Where Are the Workers? Millions Are Sick With ‘Long Covid.’
https://www.barrons.com/articles/labor-shortage-workers-millions-sick-long-covid-51638923422
Dr. Schluger offers some hope for those afflicted with long Covid, and thus for the labor force. It may take a year or more, but symptoms mostly will resolve for many patients, he says. That could mean that more people, especially women, will return to work in time, and that some early retirees will boomerang back into the job market as they recover, giving a significant if delayed boost to labor-force participation.
There is so obviously a clear lack of understanding for what it means for this process to be ongoing. Infections are not stopping, if anything herd immunity is being pursued more than ever. It means it will not be going down, as some recover, others are falling ill and it just goes on and on and on. There is a threshold at which new cases of LC overtake the recovery process, and no one knows what it is, and no one would recognize it if we hit it.
Medicine deals with discrete events: accidents, injuries, infections. Everything else is psychosocial, made irrelevant. The whole thing just falls apart when it becomes serialized, chronicity is basically medicine's kryptonite. It's hard to understand how anyone can genuinely think this is good news and simply fail to understand the broader implications, the thinking here assumes that cases will die down, I have no idea based on what, other than hopium.
This is what specialist thinking does, it's too narrow and focused on a few targets, oblivious to externalities and opportunity cost. There has to be people able to see the big picture here, the experts making the decisions are knee-deep into their own tiny place of work, no one works on seeing the whole. As statements, it's very clear to "actually, climate change offers many opportunities". It's terrifying to see how little thinking has adapted to circumstances.