Well, We Now Have a number

Workforce participation still has not recovered

I have noted that a lot of the labor shortage is an artifact of people remaining out of the workforce, and we finally have a number, 2-4 million people are out of the labor market because of the condition.

This explains a lot of the current labor shortage:

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There remain many unknowns about long Covid, including causes, cures, even how to define it. But this much is clear: The illness is disabling thousands, perhaps millions, of workers to such an extent that they must throttle back hours or leave the workforce altogether.

In other words, at a time when job openings are near an all-time high, long Covid is reducing the supply of people able to fill those positions. The dynamic may have large and adverse effects on the U.S. economy.

Long Covid "is certainly wind blowing in the other direction" of economic growth, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan who served as chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor in the Obama administration.

I'm not sure how much this is an actual headwind.  Workers in the lower half of the income distribution are the one who are seeing the largest wage increases.

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Estimating the labor impact of long Covid — also known as long-haul Covid, post-Covid or post-acute Covid syndrome — is a somewhat fraught mathematical exercise; it’s complicated by the nebulous nature of the fledgling illness and a dearth of data tracking how people with long-haul symptoms flow in and out of work.

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Katie Bach, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has published one of the higher estimates to date. She found that 2 million to 4 million full-time workers are out of the labor force due to long Covid. (To be counted in the labor force, an individual must have a job or be actively looking for work.)

The midpoint of her estimate — 3 million workers — accounts for 1.8% of the entire U.S. civilian labor force. The figure may “sound unbelievably high” but is consistent with the impact in other major economies like the United Kingdom, Bach wrote in an August report. The figures are also likely conservative, since they exclude workers over age 65, she said.

The economic costs of Covid probably dwarf the cost of public health measures to mitigate the effects of the pandemic.

Certainly, it exceeds that of simple masking.