Illness caused by COVID-19 shrank the U.S. labor force by around 500,000 people, a hit that is likely to continue if the virus continues to sicken workers at current rates, according to a new study released today, the Wall Street Journal reported. Millions of people left the labor force — the number of people working or looking for work — during the pandemic for various reasons, including retirement, lack of child care and fear of COVID-19. The total size of the labor force reached 164.7 million people in August, exceeding the February 2020 pre-pandemic level for the first time. The labor force would have 500,000 more members if not for the people sickened by COVID-19, according to the study’s authors, economists Gopi Shah Goda of Stanford University and Evan J. Soltas, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If we stay where we are with COVID infection rates going forward, we expect that 500,000-person loss to persist until either exposure goes down or severity goes down,” said Mr. Soltas. That assumes that some of those previously sickened eventually return to work. The authors “provide the most credible evidence to date about labor-market impacts for a large set of workers,” said Aaron Sojourner, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, who wasn’t involved in the study. The study, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, was based on a representative population of more than 300,000 workers followed over 14 months in the Census Bureau’s monthly household survey. The analysis covered the period from January 2010 to June 2022. The authors used health-related, weeklong absences as a proxy for probable COVID illnesses. From March 2020 to June 2022, approximately 10 workers per thousand missed a week of work due to health reasons, on average, up from six per thousand on average over the decade before the pandemic.
