One billion days lost: How #COVID-19 is hurting the US workforce | #McKinsey (eh oui)
▻https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/one-billion-days-lost-how-covid-19-is-hurting-the-us-workforce
COVID-19 may no longer be a pandemic, but the disease likely reduced the availability of the US workforce by as much as 2.6 percent in 2022—a burden on productivity that could last for years.
COVID-19 has gradually become a part of the US landscape. Changes in official policy have indicated as much, as has the public’s clear acceptance of the risks of the disease. These shifts are consistent with the scenarios that we and others have described: COVID-19 is now endemic in the United States.
However, that does not mean that we have defeated the disease. Every day, between 250 and 400 US families lose a loved one to COVID-19.1 That’s roughly 2.5 to 4.0 times the average number of daily deaths from the flu in the decade preceding the pandemic.2 For these families (and those of the more than one million victims since 2020), COVID-19 is an unalloyed tragedy.
Another ongoing effect of COVID-19 is less critical, and less obvious, but nevertheless substantial: more than two years after the lockdown, the disease continues to exert a brake on the US economy through productive workdays lost to worker illness, caregivers’ responsibilities for children and seniors, and compliance with isolation guidelines. And some analysts are starting to notice.3
We estimate that each case of COVID-19—including both those diagnosed and those that do not make it into official statistics—leads to 1.0 to 1.5 days of productive work lost, depending on the scenario. By itself, that is not catastrophic for anyone, worker or employer. But the scale of the endemic is vast: the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation suggests that there were 315 million to 690 million COVID-19 cases in the United States in 2022. Only a small portion of these cases, however, are captured in public-health statistics.4
Do the math, and 315 million to 1.05 billion worker days were likely lost to COVID-19 last year, equivalent to 1.3 million to 4.3 million workers dropping out of the workforce for the full year.5 At the high end, that’s about double the average number of sick days taken by US workers in the decade before the pandemic. Stated differently, the cumulative impact of lost time due to COVID-19 is equivalent to a 0.8 to 2.6 percent reduction in the availability of the US workforce.6 In our view, this is a hidden loss that could help explain the persistent US worker shortage.