The estimates I saw were 3.5 million took early retirement.

Also, sorry this is grim, but the pandemic has also killed hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them were workers.

and dont forget those who cant work anymore because of (most serious versions of) long covid.

Your second point, grim as it may be, is probably worth larger consideration. I'm projecting here, but I believe many of them were the kind of people that had 3 jobs in order to make ends meet and couldn't take time off to get the vaccine, and the subtext is that the economy was actually more reliant on that tiny pool of people (<0.2% of Americans) than we realized!

Yes, many of the workers who died were in front-line / public-facing jobs. I heard "line cook" was one of the jobs with the highest mortality level. So tragic.

I'd doubt it. Those in said positions are the younger portion of the population and thus at dramatically lower risk of death.

I think there is actually a lot of data that many of the low wage positions are long term jobs for a middle aged to older demographic.

Your point still stands (those people had high contact jobs), but most of the people who died did so prior to vaccine availability. It's only been the past ~4-5 months where there's been widespread availability. And there are very few people at this point (in the US) who haven't gotten the vaccine solely because of their scheduling (though that reason might be cited as a clean justification!). It's clearly vaccine hesitancy...

"but the pandemic has also killed hundreds of thousands of people." Apparently it wiped out the flu too.

Take COVID stats with a huge grain of salt - the reporting around them has been (and still is) grossly politicized :p