New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work
This June, the Census Bureau finally added
about long Covid to its Household Pulse Survey (HPS), giving researchers a better understanding of the condition’s prevalence. This report uses the new data to assess the labor market impact and economic burden of long Covid, and finds that:
- Around 16 million working-age Americans (those aged 18 to 65) have long Covid today.
- Of those, 2 to 4 million are out of work due to long Covid.
- The annual cost of those lost wages alone is around $170 billion a year (and potentially as high as $230 billion).
Typically organizational ability and resilience translates across multiple fields. A country good at the automotive industry, for instance, used to be seen as a country with an exceptionally high military potential, as the automotive industry requires the discipline and industrial capability to produce all defense related equipment such as disciplined workers, standardized training, trucks, tanks, artillery, etc. Germany, Japan, US, even Russia, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were all military powers who got their start with the auto industry, and the fall of the British automotive industry coincided with Britain's fall as a globally competitive military power.
COVID resistance involves all skills related to 21st century defense including highly selective identification and neutralization of hostile agents, large scale resilient logistics to support lockdowns and societal discipline to weather crises. The countries that crumbled under COVID should have every aspect of their so called "strength" questioned. The old question was, "if you can't even make some motorized vehicle that rolls on wheels, how can your country make tanks?" The new question is, "if your country can't even coordinate a response against a simple flu, how does it handle more complex crises?"