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Comment by yasp | Hacker News Reader

Ostensibly they are missing from the labor force, not from the planet.

So the trouble is, there's a lot more than 10m people outside the labor force of the relevant countries - that's true even if you only consider people who are actually in those countries, let alone the people who live in other countries who have not migrated there. The trick is figuring out which 10 million of those people are the ones who would have been participating in that labor force.

Will HR permit hiring someone who was downsized or it not currently working in that role with that job title? Its all about risk minimization, not workforce maximization.

How many are dead or permanently disabled because of Covid, I wonder.

COVID has killed hundreds of thousands, but overwhelmingly older or weaker folks, the kinds who are retired, semi-retired, or on disability. This would have had an impact, but not 10 million

Considering almost 7m people died from covid officially … Yeah they’re pretty missing

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

The Economist puts excess deaths at 20m

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

How many of these dead people were of a working age?

Enough?

Keep in mind we got some of the first ever basic human rights because there weren’t enough peasants after the black plague.

I mean in the context of does it explain the absent workers?

If you go with that excess deaths number, if the answer was 1/4 (which is what stats suggest) that covers half of the 10M.

There's still the other half, but that's not nothing.

I would think that the older folks that died from Covid had some money to leave to their children or grandchildren, who use that to either take an extended vacation, or sabbatical or whatever. Just because they are old and weren't working doesn't mean their early death didn't have a monetary affect.

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