Hat tip to Bryce Covert at Talking Points Memo for picking up on reports that Long Covid is still having a major impact on the economy.
Long COVID Has Likely Taken Millions of Americans Out of the Workforce
...But [Amanda] Finley hasn’t been able to go out on a single dig, or even a delivery, since early 2020. She contracted COVID that March, in the first wave of the pandemic, and nearly three years later her symptoms still haven’t resolved. Other than a short contract job in 2021 she’s remained unemployed.
Data suggests that millions of Americans now find themselves in a similar situation, but it’s tricky to know exactly how widespread long COVID is, or how it is affecting America’s workforce. Somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of people who get COVID develop long COVID, according to the Government Accountability Office, or between 7.7 million and 23 million Americans. While symptoms vary, long COVID typically involves fatigue, cognitive issues like “brain fog,” muscle or joint pain, organ damage, heart issues, shortness of breath, and/or mood changes.
Like Finley, some sufferers have been left so impaired that they’re no longer able to work, or at least not in the same job or under the same conditions that they used to. And yet we still don’t know for sure just how many people have been affected this way or what the impact on the economy has been. As data continues to roll in, however, it seems quite likely that long COVID is a significant part of why the labor market is currently so tight: it has forced people out of the workforce, plunging them into financial turmoil, which is making it harder for employers to find workers.
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Covert cites several studies to back this up. An international study estimates looking at 4,000 individuals found 22% had left the work force because of Covid. Researchers looking at the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey found that workers who had been out of work at least a week from a Covid infection were:
...7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force a year later compared to those who hadn’t had such a disruption.
….Thus, they concluded, COVID illness had reduced the labor force participation rate by 0.2 percentage points by June, meaning there were about 500,000 fewer people working.
...The labor force losses will cost the economy about $62 billion a year, they calculate. “COVID is basically half as costly to the U.S. economy as diabetes or all cancers,” Soltas noted.
This is not the entire story, as researchers note. Some people may have been laid off because of the pandemic and simply chose not to return to the work force. Others may have chosen to cut back on work to avoid exposure health risks. Making a direct connection between Long Covid and employment is problematic, but there is enough data to suggest it is a factor in current job market numbers.
One study finds that workers who have had Covid are less likely to be working, and will be putting in fewer hours if they are. Another study concludes one effect is that there are now more disabled in the work force.
Forbes reports that a Brookings Institute study concludes Covid is keeping 4 million out of the workforce.
The Brookings report uses updated data from Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey in June, which included four new questions about Long Covid to better understand the condition’s prevalence and impact. The survey found that 16.3 million people (around 8%) of working-age Americans currently have Long Covid.
Brookings corroborated those findings with a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study, which found that 24.1% of people who have contracted Covid-19 experienced symptoms for three months or more. According to the CDC, about 70% of Americans have contracted Covid-19. This percentage translates to 34 million working-age Americans experiencing Long Covid symptoms. The same study found that 50% of respondents had recovered from Long Covid, leaving approximately, around 17 million people who may currently have Long Covid.
The Brookings study attempted to deal with the differing outcomes of Covid to account for its impact: those who can’t work, those who can work but are cutting back on hours, those who still work because they have no alternative.
In order to accommodate these diverse experiences in their estimates, Brookings drew data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, United Kingdom’s Trades Union Congress, and a Lancet study about the extent of work reductions. This data resulted in estimates of 2 million, 3 million, and 4 million full-time equivalent workers out of the labor force due to Long Covid. The midpoint of this range (3 million full-time equivalent workers) is 1.8% of the entire U.S. civilian labor force.
Long Covid — the new problem for disability claims
It’s not just the work force numbers that are important here. Long Covid is a de facto new kind of disability that can make it impossible for people to support themselves, with short to long-term consequences depending on how severe it is.
Covert at TPM discusses the problem. Whether an employer offers paid sick leave or not can be a critical difference with any illness, but Covid is a real problem as Covert explains:
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers to offer disabled workers reasonable accommodations. But it requires a medical diagnosis, and there is currently no clinical diagnostic criteria for long COVID. “If you’re going to get an accommodation, you typically need proof from a physician that you have this condition,” Deitz said. “Because long COVID is so new, people may not be getting an accurate diagnosis.” Worse, people who got COVID in the early months of the pandemic, before testing was widely available, may have no way to prove that their symptoms stem from the infection. But even with a diagnosis, the kinds of impairments that tend to come with long COVID, such as brain fog or fatigue, are ones that can be harder to get accommodations for, such as a flexible schedule or working from home.
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For someone seriously impaired by Long Covid, it gets worse.
If a disability is severe enough, Americans can apply for Supplemental Security Income, a program that’s part of Social Security meant to help disabled people who have little to no income, and Social Security Disability Insurance, a longer-term program. For Disability Insurance, an applicant has to prove that their ability to work has been substantially limited and that it will last more than 12 months. An initial determination typically takes five months, and two-thirds of applications get denied on average. It requires resources and support to keep making the case. “It’s a process that is set up in many ways to assume that you’re not really having these problems,” said Shawn Fremsted, senior policy fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Given that Republicans are promising to use the debt ceiling to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare, the odds are grim that the Federal Government will be able to act on what is apparently going to be long term problem for millions of Americans. Given that they also want to hold hearings to gin up some kind of criminal charges against Dr. Fauci, any action to deal with Covid’s continuing effects are going to face knee-jerk Republican obstruction.
Which is also GOP SOP for anything that would enable government to make lives better for Americans, because ‘reasons’. If you want to live, voting for any Republican anywhere at any time is a major health risk. Don’t do it.
So now what?
The ‘good’ news is that there are some people who have no worries about Covid — the 300 who still die from it every day in the United States. That may be down from peak numbers at the height of the pandemic, but it’s still nothing to be complacent about.
An opinion piece in The NY Times by Florian Krammer and Aubree Gordon asks Why are lots of kids likely to be sick this Holiday Season? Paradoxically, it’s because of the pandemic.
During the first two years of the pandemic, people largely got a reprieve from other viruses like flu and respiratory syncytial virus, also known as RSV. Many people went two years without getting sick, perhaps a first in their lifetime and certainly out of the ordinary for children. Outbreaks that did occur were much smaller than usual.
Measures against Covid, such as masks, social distancing, closing schools, combined to greatly reduce the normal transmission of cold and flu viruses — which also means many children are only now getting exposed to them and their immune systems are only now being challenged.
The pandemic has been a learning experience. We can use those lessons going forward. They are not really surprising: better ventilation systems can make a difference, so does masking on public transportation when infection rates are high, and the most basic of all —
Staying home when sick and policies that make that possible for people is a highly effective strategy to cut transmission. Paid sick leave saves lives, and that includes Family sick leave to allow for child illness.
And of course when it comes to Covid,
Don’t skip flu shots or, if appropriate, the pneumonia vaccine either.
Carl Zimmer at The NY Times warns that the Omicron variant of Covid appears to be primed for rapid evolution into new strains that may evade vaccines and immune system defenses, although being vaccinated will still provide some measure of protection.
We may want to put Covid behind us, but it’s not going to happen. It has adapted to us; we have to adapt to it.
Again: