Most of these labor articles are about participation - which is a percentage. Unless it killed laborers disproportionately, and spared non-laborers - absolute deaths is a non-issue for participation.

It's obviously an issue for the total labor force.

That said, >75% of deaths occured in 65+ [1].

~200k*.61 = ~122k people in a workforce of 165M is a rounding error.

.61 = labor force participation rate [2]

Additionally, almost 85% of deaths occured in 55+, and participation for 55-65 is already pretty low (~38%). Articles would've stated the obvious (that people died) if it was a major cause. Almost 3M dropped out of the labor force. Deaths probably account for less 4% of that.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

> Unless it killed laborers disproportionately, and spared non-laborers

This is actually highly likely, given the facts we know.

1) It is highly transmissible when people are in close quarters for longer than a few minutes

2) Many businesses forced their employees to continue working with no PPE, no adequate ventilation, and no paid sick time

Combine these things, and you get a very high likelihood of increased transmission among the most vulnerable of laborers—which thus increases their likelihood of death in proportion.

Ah, yes, I’m sure the obese geriatric day laborers were hit extraordinarily hard by this.

More important are the millions of working-age Americans dealing with sequelae from acute covid illness, aka long covid, who are now unable to hold down a full time job. This issue has been grossly neglected because the majority of medical professionals have been largely dismissive of it.

On what basis do you believe long covid is significantly causing adults to not hold down a full time job?

The scattered anecdotes are scary: brain fog that's bad enough to prevent you from doing any mechanical or intellectual labour. The initial data was also scary, but I never saw anything with a particularly convincing survey size.

What initial data?

Near the beginning of the pandemics I've seen percentages of confirmed infections presenting symptoms X weeks after diagnosis. It seemed to not die off. But it both topped at a not too long interval and didn't see that many cases yet.

The US Census Bureau basically said as much recently. Their findings from October stated that 3.7 million people in the US were currently unemployed because they were "caring for someone or sick myself with coronavirus symptoms" [1]

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/hhp/202...

Edit: to clarify, a lot of those 3.7 million people are probably suffering from acute Covid, but if you look back at the older survey data, the number of people not working due to "coronavirus symptoms" still seems to remain pretty high even when cases are low.

It unfortunately does not describe how long the surveyed people were unemployed for which would be interesting to know. Thanks for the relevant link & data.

That data is not hard to find:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036a1.htm

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...

Based on a quick scan, none of these studies back up the OP's claim. All these studies show is that long covid exists, but nobody disputes that.

Your scan was far too quick, in that case. You might want to scan again. :)

Your comment piqued my interest in the death stats. The CDC has a nice table about half way down the page that compares rates between 2019 and 2020.

What's interesting is not that Covid spiked, but the following causes of death also changed significantly in 2020:

- heart disease +5%

- cancer -2%

- unintentional injuries +20%

- stroke +5%

- chronic lower respiratory disease -6%

- Alzhiemer's disease +10%

- diabetes +15%

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/deaths.htm

800k to be more precise. And they're not working age adults, the vast majority of covid deaths happened in elderly population (70+). And even the 800k figure is disputed as Covid being the primary cause of deathin all of those.

The 800k is disputed as being far too low. Including for excess deaths that aren't directly attributed to Covid, the count is well over a million US deaths during the pandemic.

> The 800k is disputed as being far too low.

Interesting, but since it is said without anything to back it up it can also be as easily dismissed. I based my data on https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

> Including for excess deaths that aren't directly attributed to Covid, the count is well over a million US deaths during the pandemic.

Correlation doesn't mean causation. Isolation also creates excess deaths. Economic hardships also creates excess deaths. Stress and anxiety create also excess deaths. Alcohol and drugs also create excess deaths. All of these increased since the pandemic.

The exact cause doesn't really matter in this context. The point is that more than that have died compared to a normal year.

> The exact cause doesn't really matter in this context.

It does when you're doing risk and cost analysis

> The point is that more than that have died compared to a normal year.

Deaths do not exist in a vacuum. They are caused by something.

Be quite with those statistics and mask the children because ... emotions.

quiet*

CDC estimated deaths are about 920k: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

this is both imprecise and inaccurate - excess deaths are or will very soon be 1M+ in the US