Its estimated by the CDC that almost 115 million Covid infections happened in the US.
I’ve heard up to 1/4 of covid patients develop long haul symptoms. I only know of one personally, who is a guy who was healthy before he got covid, but now has afib symptoms and can’t be physically active anymore. He has a well off wife so financially he is fine, but if he had a job that required any manual labor, he would be unemployed now.
I know there are constant stories in the news about how employers can’t find enough employees, is long haul covid a factor, has the healthy labor force declined by a few million due to long haul covid? Is there any evidence that the two factors (labor shortage and long haul covid) are connected?
The fear of getting infected is absolutely a factor. For me, I worry about the financial implications of getting a breakthrough infection. I am now working in person four days a week in an environment where I presume most people are vaccinated, but I know that some who enter the building are not vaccinated, and now that mask mandates are a thing of the past, there’s absolutely no way to enforce mask wearing. And I blame CDC’s confusing, politically-driven guidance for this, including Biden’s CDC.
What? My business and several others I know of locally require anyone entering to be masked. No way to enforce that? Sure there is. I have a sign explaining that you must be wearing a mask to enter, otherwise you’ll be trespassing and the police will be called.
First of all, can we have a cite that 1/4 of COVID infections go long? Because that’s fairly close to the number I’ve seen of COVID patients who get any symptoms at all.
Second, “long COVID” just means that a person continues to have symptoms many months later. It doesn’t necessarily mean severe symptoms, such as would prevent someone from working.
My sister is a long hauler, still little sense of taste or smell over a year later. She is working just fine. Obviously, a single case doesn’t mean much but everyone I know who had serious symptoms is back at work.
“Long covid” is a vague term. There was a recent study that says 23% of patients had “at least one post-COVID condition” 30 days after initial diagnosis.
The 30-day line seems pretty short to me when we’re talking about something that’s lasted more than a year for some people, and (at a skim) that paper doesn’t appear to track the duration of long-covid symptoms. What do the numbers look like after 60, 90, 120 days?
The law requires seatbelts and motorcycle helmets ‘forever’ - or at least anytime people use public streets.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to maintain vigilance, particularly when we have a fast-changing situation. The virus mutations are already putting serious pressure on our vaccination regime, which we suspected would happen. What some who ought to know better seem to be forgetting is that these initial vaccinations are not necessarily the cure; rather, they should be used to buy us time to develop more robust strategies to protect public health, including better classes of vaccines, reworking public and private infrastructure to adapt to viral threats, and adapting our economy to accommodate reasonable flexibility.
This is a long, long game - we have to accept that. What I don’t accept is that some people needlessly have to die or get seriously ill while we alternate back and forth between massaging the politics of the pandemic and a viable public health strategy. I think the WHO and California public health officials are getting it right and the CDC is getting it wrong, and in doing so they’re needlessly putting pressure on the vaccine effort.
At no time was it ever possible to force everyone to wear a mask. It’s still not possible to force everyone to get vaccinated. Or wear seatbelts and helmets, for that matter.
But you can still proactively protect yourself by wearing a mask, distancing, etc., etc. Think of all the medical personnel who have continuously worked with COVID patients and have still avoided becoming infected themselves. You can’t police anyone else, and clearly your employer isn’t policing your colleagues, but you can protect yourself. No one has forbidden or outlawed that. If anyone criticizes you for wearing a mask, say YOU’RE positive and they should step back. Or that someone in your family is, or whatever.
Yes, the confusing flip-flop messaging was bad. And still is bad. But it’s soooo tiresome to keep blaming the CDC and Biden for this, ya know? Possibly accurate, but so what? The horse is dead, the barn door is open, so cease flogging the poor creature.
It’s possible for any variety of Covid to create a breakthrough infection. But it’s all but certain the source of that Covid will be an unvaccinated individual, not another vaccinated person. Including all variants.
I am safer unmasked and vaccinated than masked, social distancing, and unvaccinated.
The difficulty is that we’re left with a piecemeal approach in businesses and schools now. I do not know that government could provide more mandates at this point, and they would be fought by this country’s right wing anyway.
The Houston hospital (in a red state) that fired 153 employees over refusing to get vaccinated is instructive. The 153 were less than 1% of their workforce. So that shows that many people not currently vaccinated are willing to get vaccinated if it runs deeper than the honor system.
True, but if the true infection rate is closer to 115 million, then even 1-3 million people having trouble working long term would have meaningful effects on the unemployment rate.
I have no idea why a URL for ‘beckershospitalreview’ that discusses long haul covid keeps showing up as a link back to SDMB. Thats weird. But the link will lead to the right page.
My small data point is that of the three retail workers I know, none of them have gone back to their old jobs. Why would minimum wage workers have any loyalty to their overlords? They were let go when the world ended and needed to find another way to pay their bills, so they did. They found better ways to pay their bills and are happier.
Many wageslaves have manage to cast off their chains and won’t be going back.
It’s probably going to take about two years for the reverberations from covid work through the economy. Assuming that global vaccinations continue and dumbasses in the US actually roll up their sleeves.
Live consumer industry took a huge hit and is just starting the recovery. Global supply chains are completely upside down, and key component shortages are going to last through at least the end of 2021. Heck, there are not enough 40 foot steel containers in the right place at the right time these days, and that won’t be sorted out before the end of this year at the earliest either.
And those that lost their crappy retail job and are now delivering boxes for Amazon are weighing which is the lesser of two not great choices.
Things are opening up, which means there are job openings. People have relocated and/or taken a second look. At lot of retiree age folks decided to throw in the towel. And even if the labor market eventually reaches an equilibrium, when will there be enough electronic chips to support every product in the market. Sure, I’m not weeping for Tesla drivers and a 12 month wait list, but those same chips go into John Deere tractors that are needed by farmers. We have had an unprecidented global disruption at a time when global supply chains have never been more entertwined. And the pandemic is still burning through much of world. 2 years to reach the new normal seems pretty optimistic to me.
Can I have a cite for 3/4 of covid infections being asymptomatic? I remember that number being about 40% and many of those are not truly asymptomatic. Maybe you mean 3/4 of transmissions are from someone that was asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, or mildly symptomatic?
That, as well as the fact that quitting my job means losing my health insurance, which is probably not wise during a pandemic.
As for why employees aren’t going back to work, it’s probably a matter of some workers having excess money in their bank accounts versus wages not being attractive enough to bring back workers. Bigger, well-positioned companies can absorb this cost and offer incentives, including signing bonuses and a boost in hourly wages. Once again, it’s the small entrepreneur (a single location family-owned pizzeria, for instance) that is probably feeling the stress of this.