Maybe it's splitting hairs, but there is COVID, and then there's COVID policies and reactions. It's sad, but with various kinds of stimulus (extra child tax cre

Maybe it's splitting hairs, but there is COVID, and then there's COVID policies and reactions. It's sad, but with various kinds of stimulus (extra child tax credits, the COVID checks) people on the bottom of the economic totem pole were actually more flush than before COVID. Add in the shutdowns with schools and it just made more economic sense for someone to stay home with the kids than beforehand. Some, I'm sure, were also scared (some cases rightly, in others in spite of being in a statistically 'safe' demographic). In summation, I suspect that the labor force contraction was more from the reaction to COVID than people just becoming chronically ill and disabled. I sure hope that's the case, time will tell. I don't think we're disagreeing on what the numbers say, perhaps just on what we attribute the drivers for those numbers. We have a lot of different polities (US states, foreign governments, even school district to school district) where different policies were put into effect. I hope we crunch the hell out of these numbers and learn some lessons about whatever response was the best for human welfare. It's going to have to be a retrospective thing, as longer term loss from chronic illness (if it turns out that COVID does cause this in some percentage of the population) and learning loss, psychological effect, etc, etc. I fear there will be more pandemics in the future. I hope we can have a sober analysis of which harms were caused by what turned out to be erroneous policy and what harms we failed to prevent so in a future pandemic we can act in whatever way best safeguards human welfare. I sadly expect that the answers will make everyone look bad at least some of the time and for partisan reasons we won't look at this though.