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Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

The preponderance of factors kicked off by the pandemic is really interesting and I imagine it will be studied for quite some time. You have people retiring, people finding better paying jobs after being laid off en masse, service-workers tired of being harassed by stressed and belligerent customers, people simply tired of making terrible minimum-wages... it goes on and on.

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Also around 150k working age adults are dead from COVID.

While its a tragedy so many people have died from COVID, 150k people is 0.10% of the workforce.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat08.htm

150 / 147,795 = 0.001014

Sure but the labor shortage doesn't have one single cause, it's a bunch of stuff piling up on top of each other.

I mean I agree, COVID has definitely impacted the workforce in a wide variety of complicated ways and even then its not necessarily a 1 for 1 of working adults dying. Also, due to COVID complications there have also been a lot of people who are now disabled/unable to do their previous jobs which also impacts these numbers. I just wanted to point out that while 150k is a lot of people, its not really a massive percentage of the overall US workforce.

Well, if we're going to go there, it should be pointed out that there's lot more people who were not working, who added to aggregate demand but contributed no labor.

That's true, though I wonder how much of a contributor to overall aggregate demand the elderly are.

No. That is a "with COVID" number, not a "from COVID" number. You really can't escape the truth that the public policy response to COVID was a mistake –– a very grave mistake. Nothing should have been shut down, and the contrarians who said so at the time were vilified then and continue to be vilified. But they were right.

Hmm so purpose of the response was to avoid deaths, and now that that happened you downplay the situation to say "See ? We didn't need it"

That's like saying "I haven't died in 10 car crashes with my seatbelt, that must mean crashes are not really that bad so there's no point in using the seatbelt"

It's worse than that. It's a banker saying since he won't need health & safety regulations sitting at his desk the men working in coal and steel don't need any either. You do wonder if they say these things out of malice or confusion, but for practical purposes the distinction is immaterial.

With*

That's 0.075% of working-age adults. Fear of covid has driven more people out of the workforce than dying from covid.

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