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The people who died would have mostly been retired or lower productivity. Shouldnt impact labor costs much. Age pyramid definitely would though.

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> Johnson took excess deaths and COVID deaths by age and applied labor force participation rates by age. And he got 300,000 workers who died as a result of COVID. Add that to the long-haul workers, and we’ve lost 1.9 million workers — or 18% of currently unfilled jobs.

Note: most of those long-haulers have recovered, but I suspect that a great many of those didn’t recover back to their original job. That means during the time they were disabled, they had to be replaced, possibly at a higher wage.

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-...

I am pretty dubious of this based on the age distribution of deaths (most were over 65 and 50-65 is the only bracket with large numbers who werent below retirement age--average is 61) but thank you for providing a counter argument with data.

Long COVID would, though. And if people who would mostly have been retired or lower productivity are more likely to die and children don't contribute to the labor force in most of the US, long COVID would affect working age people primarily, no?

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