The study, which has not been peer reviewed, was written by Gopi Shah Goda, PhD, with the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford (Calif.) University, and Evan Soltas, a PhD student in economics at the Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors found that an additional 500,000 people would be working or looking for work nationwide if they had not fallen ill with COVID-19.
“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,” Mr. Soltas told The Wall Street Journal. That assumes that some of the people with COVID-19 illnesses return to their jobs.
The study is based on Census Bureau data. According to The Wall Street Journal, the authors considered a representative population of more than 300,000 workers followed over more than a year in the Census Bureau’s monthly household survey. The study covered January 2010 to June 2022.
The authors evaluated health-related absences as a proxy for probable COVID-19 illness. They found that workers with weeklong COVID-19 work absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the U.S. labor force one year later than workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons.
“Our estimates suggest COVID-19 illnesses have reduced the U.S. labor force by approximately 500,000 people (0.2 percent of adults) and imply an average forgone earnings per COVID-19 absence of at least $9,000, about 90 percent of which reflects lost labor supply beyond the initial absence week,” the authors wrote.
Read the full study here.
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