Re:Why is U.S. labor supply so low?
by lepus on Sunday December 26, 2021 @03:08AM
(#29690625)
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.
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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.
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.