Charlotte Hultquist
Charlotte Hultquist
Weeks after Charlotte Hultquist got Covid-19 in November 2020, she developed a severe pain in her right ear.
“It felt like someone was sticking a knife in [it],” said Hultquist, a single mother of 5 who lives in Hartford, Vermont.
The 41-year-old is certainly one of hundreds of thousands of Americans who’ve long Covid. The chronic illness carries a bunch of doubtless debilitating symptoms that may last for months or years, making it unimaginable for some to work.
For a few 12 months, Hultquist was amongst those long Covid patients sidelined from the workforce. She would fall continuously, tripping just by stepping over a toy or small object on the ground. She eventually learned that the balance issues and ear pain resulted from a damaged vestibular nerve, a known effect of long Covid. After rigorous testing, a physical therapist told Hultquist she had the “balance of a 1-year-old learning to walk.”
Her body — which she said felt prefer it weighed 1,000 kilos — couldn’t regulate its temperature, causing dramatic swings from cold to hot.
Her work on the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s information desk required a pointy memory of the hospital’s layout — but long Covid dulled that clarity, too. She needed to quit her job as a patient care representative in March 2021.
“I could not work when my memory just kept failing,” Hultquist said.
There remain many unknowns about long Covid, including causes, cures, even how one can define it. But this much is evident: The illness is disabling hundreds, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of staff to such an extent that they need to 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 provision of individuals capable of fill those positions. The dynamic could have large and hostile effects on the U.S. economy.
Long Covid “is actually wind blowing in the opposite direction” of economic growth, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics on the University of Michigan who served as chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor within the Obama administration.
As much as 4 million persons are out of labor
Estimating the labor impact of long Covid — also often 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 knowledge tracking how individuals with long-haul symptoms flow out and in of labor.
Economic models suggest that lots of of hundreds of individuals and potentially hundreds of thousands are out of labor due to long-haul symptoms after a Covid infection.
“At a minimum, long Covid is adding quite a lot of uncertainty to an already very uncertain economic picture,” Paige Ouimet, an economist and finance professor on the University of North Carolina, wrote in September.
Mild symptoms, employer accommodations or significant financial need can all keep individuals with long Covid employed. But in lots of cases, long Covid impacts work.
Katie Bach
nonresident senior fellow on the Brookings Institution
Katie Bach, a nonresident senior fellow on the Brookings Institution, has published certainly one of the upper estimates up to now. She found that 2 million to 4 million full-time staff are out of the labor force as a consequence of long Covid. (To be counted within the labor force, a person should have a job or be actively on the lookout for work.)
The midpoint of her estimate — 3 million staff — accounts for 1.8% of the complete U.S. civilian labor force. The figure may “sound unbelievably high” but is consistent with the impact in other major economies like the UK, Bach wrote in an August report. The figures are also likely conservative, since they exclude staff over age 65, she said.
“Mild symptoms, employer accommodations or significant financial need can all keep individuals with long Covid employed,” Bach said. “But in lots of cases, long Covid impacts work.”
Impact akin to extra 12 months of baby boomers retiring
Other studies have also found a large, though more muted, impact.
Economists Gopi Shah Goda and Evan Soltas estimated 500,000 Americans had left the labor force through this June as a consequence of Covid.
That led the labor force participation rate to fall by 0.2 percentage points — which can sound small but amounts to in regards to the same share as baby boomers retiring annually, in line with the duo, respectively of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Put one other way: Long Covid’s labor impact translates to an additional 12 months of population aging, Goda said.
For the common person, the work absence from long Covid translates to $9,000 in foregone earnings over a 14-month period — representing an 18% reduction in pay during that point, Goda and Soltas said. In aggregate, the lost labor supply amounts to $62 billion a 12 months — reminiscent of half the lost earnings attributable to illnesses like cancer or diabetes.
What’s more, foregone pay may complicate an individual’s ability to afford medical care, especially if coupled with the lack of medical health insurance through the workplace.
A separate Brookings paper published in October estimated about 420,000 staff aged 16 to 64 years old had likely left the labor force due to long Covid. The authors — Louise Sheiner and Nasiha Salwati — cite a “reasonable” range of 281,000 to 683,000 people, or 0.2% to 0.4% of the U.S. labor force.
About 26% of long-haulers said their illness negatively affected employment or work hours, in line with a July report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Those with long Covid were 10 percentage points less more likely to be employed than individuals and not using a prior Covid infection, and worked 50% fewer hours, on average, in line with Dasom Ham, the report’s writer.
Return to work might be ‘a very frustrating experience’
Outside of those economic models, the labor impact was borne out in quite a few CNBC interviews with long Covid patients and doctors who concentrate on treating the illness.
Just half of the patients who visit the Mayo Clinic’s Covid Activity Rehabilitation Program can work a full-time schedule, said Dr. Greg Vanichkachorn, this system’s medical director.
“Due to the brain fog issues along with physical symptoms, many patients have had a very frustrating experience attempting to get back to work,” Vanichkachorn said.
Those capable of return, even part-time, sometimes face hostility from employers and associates, he added.
For one, lots of the lots of of potential long Covid symptoms are invisible to others, even when disabling for the afflicted. Difficulty meeting a piece deadline as a consequence of brain fog or extreme fatigue, for instance, might not be met kindly by their colleagues.
Long Covid is so different for therefore many alternative people.
Alice Burns
associate director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at health-care nonprofit The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
“There are some people on the market who don’t even think Covid exists,” Vanichkachorn said.
Meanwhile, long Covid can put even accommodating employers in a difficult situation. It might probably take several months for a patient to make progress in treatment and therapy — meaning some businesses might have to make tough retention, hiring and personnel decisions, Vanichkachorn said. Lengthy recovery times mean a patient’s job is perhaps filled within the interim, he said.
And patients’ symptoms can relapse in the event that they push themselves too rigorously, experts said.
“You’ll be able to bring a [long Covid] diagnosis to your employer, but it surely doesn’t mean you can say, ‘I must be part time for X variety of months,” said Alice Burns, associate director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at health care nonprofit the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “It might be more months or fewer months; it could mean you’ll be able to return 10% or 80%.
“That is simply because long Covid is so different for therefore many alternative people.”
Why the long Covid labor gap matters
Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, mentioned Sheiner and Salwati’s long Covid research in a recent speech about inflation and the labor market.
Hundreds of thousands of individuals left the labor force within the early days of the pandemic, as a consequence of aspects like illness, caregiving and fear of infection. But staff have not returned as quickly as imagined, particularly those outside their prime working years, Powell said. About 3.5 million staff are still missing, he said.
While most of that shortfall is as a consequence of “excess” (i.e., early) retirements, “among the participation gap” is attributable to long Covid, Powell said. Other big contributors to the shortfall include a plunge in net immigration to the U.S. and a surge in deaths in the course of the pandemic, he added.
“Looking back, we will see that a major and protracted labor supply shortfall opened up in the course of the pandemic — a shortfall that appears unlikely to completely close anytime soon,” the Fed chair said.
That shortfall has broad economic repercussions.
When the U.S. economy began to reopen in early 2021 from its pandemic-era hibernation — across the time Covid vaccines became widely available to Americans — demand for labor catapulted to historic highs.
Job openings peaked near 12 million in March 2022 and remain well above the pre-pandemic high. There are currently 1.7 job openings per unemployed American — meaning the available jobs are almost double the number of individuals on the lookout for work, though the ratio has declined in recent months.
That demand has led businesses to boost wages to compete for talent, helping fuel the fastest wage growth in 25 years, in line with Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta data.
While strong wage growth “is thing” for staff, its current level is unsustainably high, Powell said, serving to stoke inflation, which is running near its highest level because the early Eighties. (There are a lot of tentacles feeding into inflation, and the extent to which wage growth is contributing is the topic of debate, nonetheless.)
A employee shortage — exacerbated by long Covid — helps underpin dynamics which have fueled fast-rising prices for household goods and services.
However the labor gap is just the “tip of the iceberg,” said Stevenson on the University of Michigan. There are all styles of unknowns relative to the economic impact of long Covid, reminiscent of effects on employee productivity, the forms of jobs they’ll do, and the way long the illness persists, she said.
“Whenever you’re sick, you are not productive, and that is not good for you or for anybody around you,” Stevenson said of the economic impact.
For instance, lost pay might weigh on consumer spending, the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. The sick might have to lean more on public aid programs, like Medicaid, disability insurance or nutrition assistance (i.e., food stamps) funded by taxpayer dollars.
Economic drag will rise if recovery rates don’t improve
Americans would forgo $168 billion in lost earnings — about 1% of all U.S. economic output — if 3 million were out of labor as a consequence of long Covid, said Bach of the Brookings Institution. That burden will proceed to rise if long Covid patients don’t start recovering at greater rates, she said.
“To provide a way of the magnitude: If the long Covid population increases by just 10% annually, in 10 years, the annual cost of lost wages might be half a trillion dollars,” Bach wrote.
Charlotte Hultquist
Charlotte Hultquist
Hultquist was capable of return to the workforce part time in March, after a yearlong absence.
The Vermont resident sometimes had to cut back her typical workweek of about 20 hours, due partly to ongoing health issues, in addition to multiple doctor appointments for each her and her daughter, who also has long Covid. Meanwhile, Hultquist nearly emptied her savings.
Hultquist has benefited from different treatments, including physical therapy to revive muscle strength, therapy to “tone” the vagus nerve (which controls certain involuntary bodily functions) and occupational therapy to assist overcome cognitive challenges, she said.
“All my [health] providers keep saying, ‘We do not know what the longer term looks like. We do not know for those who’ll recover such as you were before Covid,'” Hultquist said.
The therapy and adaptations eventually led her to hunt full-time employment. She recently accepted a full-time job offer from the Latest Hampshire Department of Health & Human Services, where she’ll function a case aide for economic services.
“It feels amazing to be recovered enough to work full time,” Hultquist said. “I’m very removed from pre-Covid functioning but I discovered a method to keep moving forward.”