26% of people 65 and older were working in 2019. Between Feb 2020 and Feb 2021 the labor force participation rate for that age bracket dropped 11.2%, while the younger brackets dropped 1-2%. That's a significant number of people who didn't die but either lost their jobs or felt unsafe continuing to work and decided to retire rather than looking for a new job.

Exactly, the quitting is the bigger factor. It's not that the labor force has died in mass.

It's sufficient but the causality tends to be secondary.

America, as currently patterned, is a fragile society. People balance work and family through ad-hoc systems with few redundancies. Now a pandemic comes around that killed a bunch of people who were providing informal support for the main workforce.

A man in Georgia can't do full-time anymore because he's a single dad and the daycare shut down for the duration of the pandemic. A mom exits the workforce because the grandparents who were watching the kids after school are now dead. Someone loses someone dear to them and re-thinks their life direction. These things add up.

> The vast majority of the deaths have been in age groups that are typically out of the workforce.

But I had the impression people were unable to retire or retiring significantly later.

Yes, there has been a trend of working longer. Those older age groups have much lower participation rates to begin with.