By Isabelle Wilson-
Research into the long-term effects of Covid-19 on the US workforce suggests that half a-million people of working age across all ages have reportedly permanently disappeared from the U.S workforce according to analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows.
According to statistics, 145 million people around the world suffered from symptoms of long COVID during the first two years of the pandemic. These symptoms include shortness of breath, fatigue with bodily pains, and cognitive problems. No proven treatment for long covid exists, leaving its sufferers in limbo, sometimes forced to experiment with unreliable treatments.
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Fragments of SARS-CoV-2 continue to create problems by stimulating the immune system. There have also been undeniable indications that the infection generates antibodies which mistakenly attack the body’s own proteins, causing damage long after the initial illness. Researchers have found hints that COVID-19 could cause microscopic blood clots that block oxygen flow to tissues. It is also possible that a SARS-CoV-2 infection can wreak long-term havoc on gut microorganisms.
Suggestions that Drugs that suppress the immune system could quench a misguided immune response have been inconclusive.
Shah Goda, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and her co-author, Evan Soltas, a Ph.D. student at MIT, estimate in a new study that roughly 500,000 U.S. adults are out of the labour force due to prior COVID-19 illness.
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Goda and Soltas have also shown that workers with a COVID-19 illness earn on average 18 percent less over the subsequent year. This result includes people who move into lower-paying and/or part-time jobs.
The researchers estimate that, over the pandemic, the consequences of COVID-19 illnesses have cost U.S. workers about $62 billion in wages per year. That is about half of comparable estimates of the productivity costs of cancer or diabetes.
Goda and Soltas found that in a typical week during the pandemic, 10 out of every 1,000 workers were absent for a week or more for reasons related to their own illness or injury. That’s a significant increase from before the pandemic, when the absence rate was about 6 per 1,000 workers. The increase in health-related absences has fallen hardest on frontline workers, whose jobs put them at the highest risk of COVID-19 exposure
Goda and Soltas say reports of COVID-19 survivors with either ongoing symptoms or permanent impairment to their physical health were on the rise. A top policy concern from severe cases like long COVID-19 is the economic impact—including on the country’s already tight labor market—if people are unable to work.
No Consistent Definition Of Long Covid
Goda says, “there isn’t a consistent definition of what long COVID-19 entails, so even estimating its prevalence is difficult, let alone its consequences.” And relying on questionnaires of COVID-19 survivors can yield misleading estimates because people’s memories of why, for example, they quit working are not always complete or objective.
The researchers found that workers who miss a week or more of work are 7 percentage points less likely to have a job a year after their infection than similar workers who did not take time off from work because of an illness.
Other studies have revealed the impact on the workforce of long Covid, where symptoms remain months or years after the initial infection has passed.
A Brookings Institution study estimated last month that as many as 2.4 million have missed work, are temporarily absent or are working reduced hours because of the lingering effects of the virus.
This new study focuses more on the apparent effect on labor supply caused by the pandemic and those who have permanently stopped working – through choice or necessity – as a result of their sickness.
Among the main reasons are large numbers of working people transitioning straight from illness into retirement, according to the researchers, who looked at federal and state level data on Covid infections as well as deaths to evaluate the probability of workers remaining in the labor force after getting sick.
“Our estimates suggest Covid-19 illnesses have reduced the US labor force by approximately 500,000 people,” say the study’s authors, Gopi Shah Goda of Stanford University and Evan Soltas of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s economics department.
“Covid-19 illnesses persistently reduce labor supply. We estimate that workers with week-long work absences are 7% less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons.”
The study adds: “Many who fall ill but survive Covid-19 suffer from enduring health problems … approximately 500,000 adults are neither working nor actively looking for work due to the persistent effects of Covid-19 illnesses.”
The researchers say that while labour shortages caused by the pandemic are apparent in all corners of industry, it has been a challenge to evaluate their permanence.
“Many in government and the media have speculated that such post-acute conditions have reduced labor supply, but data limitations have made it difficult to assess these impacts and the economic costs of Covid-19 illnesses more broadly,” the authors say.
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