Thread by @SalvMattera

It's obvious to me that COVID and long COVID are fueling the labor shortage - after all, when you kill 30 million people, and disable hundreds of millions more, I don't know how things could be any different. But some people remain skeptical, so I'll walk through the numbers.

Official COVID death data is unreliable - did someone die "with" COVID or because of COVID? - so you have to look at excess deaths. As of the end of last year, The Economist estimated that just over 28 million people have died from COVID or related-causes since 2020

The majority of these people were elderly, and therefore, disproportionately more likely to be retired. But the idea that everyone who died from COVID was an unproductive nursing home resident just isn't true.

According to the CDC, about 1/4 of Americans who died from COVID officially were under the age of 65, and the vast majority of these were older than 30, meaning that about 1/4 of COVID deaths were in prime working age people.

Of course, the idea that everyone stops working at 65 just isn't true. In fact, for American seniors without a disability, 23% of them work! That's almost 1 in 4.

And many of them that don't "work", engage in crucial unpaid work. Almost 1 in 5 seniors are caregivers for their family members. Some polls have estimated that 40%+ of working families in America rely on a grandmother for childcare.

So if grandma died from COVID, there's no longer anyone to take care of the kids. This creates enormous ripple effects: the number of stay-at-home parents increased 60% between 2019 and 2021. Even if mom and dad survived their COVID infection, they may not be able to work.

All of these assumptions are just based on official COVID deaths - returning to excess deaths, the number of excess deaths has been consistently higher in prime working age people over the last few years.

So people in their 40s and 50s might not be dying from COVID officially, but they are still dying at a greater rate for whatever reason (probably the long-term effects of COVID). Many of these people were likely working before, leaving a hole in the labor force

And we know many people who get COVID don't die, but develop some degree of disability in the form of long COVID. We don't know how many people have long COVID, and to what extent it impacts their work, but it's likely substantial

The CDC Pulse survey says that nearly 2% of American adults face "significant activity limitations" from long COVID. That's 6+ million people. Some of these people can no longer work altogether, but others have had their ability to work altered in more nuanced ways

The Minneapolis Federal Reserve put out some research here, and what they found was that while a large minority of people with long COVID have to stop working altogether, the bulk of people with long COVID just work far fewer hours.

They are also far more likely to switch jobs than people without long COVID. That means they're probably moving into work that better accommodates their disabilities, or perhaps they're getting managed out from their previous roles?

Either way, by working fewer hours in a different job, it seems reasonable to assume that they're less productive now than they were before.

All of this is based on US data, but this is a global problem. It's tricky given the complexity, but I think these trends are likely much worse outside the US. For example, the labor force participation rate among seniors is much higher in many developing countries.

So yes, if you simply look at an aggregated percentage, like US labor force participation rate and note that it's approaching the level it was at in early 2020, you might be tempted to conclude things are fine. But reality is much more complex than that