Well, Duh!

It seems that the New York Times is finally realized that long Covid symptoms are keeping a lots of people out of the US workforce.  When added to the ½ or so people in the workforce who have died (out of more than a million dead), it makes for a labor shortage problem:

Long Covid is having a significant effect on America’s work force, preventing substantial numbers of people from going back to work while others continue needing medical care long after returning to their jobs, according to a new analysis of workers’ compensation claims in New York State.

The study, published Tuesday by New York’s largest workers’ compensation insurer, found that during the first two years of the pandemic, about 71 percent of people the fund classified as experiencing long Covid either required continuing medical treatment or were unable to work for six months or more. More than a year after contracting the coronavirus, 18 percent of long Covid patients had still not returned to work, more than three-fourths of them younger than 60, the analysis found.

“Long Covid has harmed the work force,” said the report, by the New York State Insurance Fund, a state agency financed by employer-paid premiums. The findings, it added, “highlight long Covid as an underappreciated yet important reason for the many unfilled jobs and declining labor participation rate in the economy, and they presage a possible reduction in productivity as employers feel the strains of an increasingly sick work force.”

Covid is bad.  It's really REALLY bad.

………

Long Covid is defined by public health authorities as a constellation of symptoms that linger after the initial infection or that emerge weeks later and can include breathing problems, fatigue and brain fog. The Government Accountability Office estimated that long Covid has affected 7.7 million to 23 million people in the United States. 

That's somewhere between 4.2% and 13.9% of the workforce.

Also, we know that Covid can cause long term immune dysregulation, which might explain the hellish season for RSV infection.

Get vaccinated, and wear a fucking mask.