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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to the Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Fall is fast approaching, and our third COVID winter is just around the corner. More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the country is still averaging more than 85,000 new COVID cases daily. Now, that's not nearly as high as the numbers we saw last year, but earlier this week, trying to get ahead of the season, the US Food and Drug Administration took some action.

Speaker 2: The FDA says new boosters from Pfizer, and Moderna take direct aim at Omicron granting both emergency use authorization.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The boosters will be available as soon as the centers for disease control approved guidelines on who should get the shot, and the roll-out could begin as soon as next week. Although the risk of severe sickness and death have gone down thanks in large part to COVID vaccines, avoiding spikes is still key to helping the most vulnerable. There's still the threat that anyone and I mean, anyone could get long COVID and that's actually the story that we want to bring to you today. The truth is doctors still don't know much about why some people develop long-lasting symptoms and others don't.

Until recently, we didn't have a good sense of just how many Americans actually have debilitating long COVID symptoms, but some new data from the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey from this summer gave us a better understanding of the prevalence of long COVID. The survey found that about 16 million people around 8% of working-age Americans have long COVID today. With symptoms like brain fog, trouble breathing, fatigue, and more, it might be hard for some of those folks to return to work. Some of you told us about your experiences with long-haul COVID symptoms and how it's affecting your work.

Chris: Hi, my name's Chris, Spokane, Washington.

Frida: Frida from Moon Township, Pennsylvania.

Chris 2: Chris from Modesto, California. It's made it very difficult. I feel like my executive functioning skills of planning and coordinating have just gone.

Frida: I have been fatigued ever since contracting COVID, which has affected my ability to paint and write.

Chris Spokane: I still experience shortness of breath and it hurts to take a deep breath and lots of fatigue. I do believe that would be long-COVID

Chris 1: Still don't have much of a sense of smell, maybe about 10%. Not that that affects my ability to do work, but it affects my ability to enjoy coffee and food and other things about life.

Frida: I don't have the thought process that I've had before. My thoughts get murky. They're not clear like they were, and it's very difficult as an author to try to continue writing a book when you don't have the mental capacity to do so.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As always, we're so grateful when you call in and you share your stories with us. Using that data from the Household Pulse Survey, a new study from the Brookings Institution works to estimate just how many folks are out of work because of long COVID. The estimates are between two and four million people. With these absent workers, it might just be having an effect on the labor market and the economy overall. I spoke with Katie Bach, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the study.

Katie Bach: With most of the data we are looking at, so take the US Household Pulse Survey. They're defining long-COVID as anyone who has new symptoms that they didn't have before a COVID infection, at least three months after they had a COVID infection. That could be anyone from someone who has been sick for a year and a half and literally can't get out of bed to someone who is four months out of a COVID infection and still doesn't have a sense of smell.

Long COVID includes a pretty wide range of experience. Not to harp on it, but one of the many reasons I'm hoping we can get better data collection about these people is it would be really helpful to know what percentage of people, yes, they stay sick for some number of months after they get good COVID with some number of symptoms but they go on to make a full recovery versus people who end up looking more like other post-viral patients, who maybe don't recover over time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It does seem that it is disabling in a large enough percentage of working-age Americans, that it's having a real effect on the economy. You write that around 16 million working-age Americans have long COVID today, and of those maybe somewhere between two and four. That's a lot, a big difference, but between two and four million people are out of work due to long COVID. How did you get to the two to four million?

Katie Bach: I do want to be clear. This is an estimate. Until we have better data, I don't think we can say with confidence what these numbers are. What I did is I started with the Household Pulse Survey, which is a census survey to understand the impact of COVID on American families. From the census survey, from the pulse survey from the census, we get to around 8% of working-age Americans have long COVID. Again, by long COVID, it just means they have some new symptom that they didn't have pre-COVID at least three months after they had COVID.

That gives us a bit over 16 million people but then the question is how many of them are so severely impacted that they can't work or that they've reduced their working hours, which my guess is potentially a bigger impact? For that, I said among working-age Americans, we know that about 25% are not in the labor force to start with. Let's just take out 25%. Of the remaining 12 million, I used three different estimates. I will say, none of them have the level of robustness of say, the US current population survey.

These aren't 60,000-person samples. These are smaller surveys but I use these three different surveys of long COVID patients to understand how many of them at any given time were unable to work. Using those estimates and including people who said they could work but they had to reduce hours, I came up with these three different data points, potentially just under two million, three million, or just over four million full-time equivalent workers. One important note, this definitionally does not include people who weren't working before.

Since I published this piece I've had, of course, people reach out to me and tell me their stories. One woman was talking about the fact that she has long COVID. She was a caretaker in her family. She can't perform those caretaking duties anymore. Obviously, that's not captured anywhere in the statistics. She wasn't in the labor force before and she's not now but her husband has actually had to scale back on working hours. Of course, that wouldn't be captured by what I'm doing either because he doesn't have long COVID. It's a very complex ripple effect issue.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It is in many ways reflective of what COVID showed us with our experience of the pandemic has been showing us about our profound interconnections with one another. That this is part of what a contagious respiratory disease demonstrates just in terms of its spread, its deadliness but then even on this other side, we continue to see those interconnections.

Katie Bach: Absolutely.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's walk through that effect then. I think that story is a really valuable one. On the one hand, these are huge numbers, but then when we bring it down even to a single story around all of the decisions that a household might need to make in terms of adjusting when one wage earner has to earn fewer wages or work fewer hours, what does this mean household-to-household for what we're seeing in our economy at this moment?

Katie Bach: [chuckles] I have spent a lot of time looking at the national level statistics and I will confess I find it challenging to figure out exactly what I would expect to see as a long COVID signal because we have a lot of different things going on at the same time. For one, labor force participation is now higher among disabled workers than it used to be or disabled Americans than it used to be, potentially due to remote work. You have these trends moving in different directions, but at a minimum, if my numbers are right, even let's talk about the bottom end of my range.

If it's two million full-time equivalent workers, that is probably enough to be contributing to the tightness of the labor market today. That's certainly not the only factor. As I said, there are factors pushing in the other direction but we are still facing a labor force with about one percentage point less participation than we'd expect from the pre-pandemic trend. What that means for employers is that it is harder to hire. Anecdotally, we hear that a lot in service sector. These are in-person, often physically demanding jobs. From the perspective of families, it obviously depends why people are out of the labor force but to the extent that people are forced out due to illness, it often, as we're saying has this double effect on families. One, it's a loss of income. Two, it is then often the case that other members of the family have to do more homework, which could mean reducing their own hours as well. From a household finance perspective, this can be really devastating.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When we've talked so frequently in recent months about the great resignation, and the effects of the great resignation on the labor market, and how this has then had these multiplicative effects around labor organizing, around wages, especially at the bottom, and then ultimately, the discussion about how all of that might be contributing to inflation, have we missed the long COVID contribution here? In other words, is the great resignation, obviously, multi-part but is at least part of it, people feeling that they can't any longer work?

Katie Bach: Again, if my estimate is even close to being right, I believe that is a factor. I also think these things-- again, there's so much going on in the labor force, post-pandemic, but imagine that we do have some level of reduction in the labor force. Let's say it's measurable. This is a big enough effect that you can see it in the national statistics, let's say. In that world, workers do suddenly have a lot more power. One of the best things you can do to improve worker wages is to run a really tight labor market.

In that world, you can imagine that workers would be more empowered to leave their jobs because there are more opportunities elsewhere. I'm now in the realm of speculation, but I absolutely can see how these things would be connected. Yes, in general, it has consistently been surprising to me that there have been all these narratives like, "Oh, people don't want to work," or "It's just unemployment insurance." Every human has just dramatically rethought what their life means to them. Which it may be everyone.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] Every single one of us, it does sometimes sound like that. [laughs]

Katie Bach: I know. Frankly, it sometimes feels like that but the point of my work isn't necessarily that I am 100% convinced that my range is exactly right. It's that this is probably a really big problem, and we have to collect better data on it.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Katie Bach is non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kate, thanks so much for joining us today.

Katie Bach: Thank you for having me.

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Omar: Hi, this is Omar from Fort Lauderdale. My long-term COVID condition is that I have a cough, a dry cough that does not go away. I constantly have to drink water. I work in a call center so I'm always on the phone. I have to mute the phone so I can cough and drink some water then unmute and continue listening to the person's complaint who's on the other line.

Vicki Rossi: Hi, my name is Vicki Rossi from West Palm Beach, Florida. I've had COVID twice. Long COVID has affected my memory and ability to find my words. It's stolen my vocabulary, which is vital for me to communicate with the community, at work, and with stakeholders. As a community advocate, it's a deficiency I struggle with every day. Thanks.

Mary Golden: Hi, my name is Mary Golden. I'm calling from San Diego. I have long COVID. It's a nightmare. My hair's falling out, my smell is gone. I sleep all the time, I can't work. It's hard to make money when you can't work. It's been a real problem. Most doctors just scratch their head and look at you with a blank stare because they don't know what to do about it either. Thank you very much for focusing on this. I think it's very important. Again, my name is Mary Golden. Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Give us a call at 877-869-8253 or record your message at 877-869-8253 or you can also send a voice memo to takeawaycallers@gmail.com.

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