[curryst]

Yeah, I can't read it, but "millions" sound rather high to me. In 2019 there were 157 million American workers. That's expected to increase by 2 million in 2022, to 159 million workers. The number of workers is higher than it was, although perhaps that growth is lower than it would normally be, I don't know.

"Millions" does imply full percentage points of the workforce have long COVID. That sounds high to me, because it either means long COVID is pretty common or that a lot of people have gotten COVID.

It's entirely possible we're over-diagnosing it. The symptoms of long COVID overlap with practically every common condition out there, not to mention a lot of them can be stress induced. There's been a lot of stress going around, too.

I don't know if we'd expect to see an uptick in Social Security just yet. Unemployment was covering people up until fairly recently, and I believe is much easier to get.

More generally, I doubt the government will make it eligible for disability, or they'll limit it to extremely severe cases. I don't know that we can fiscally afford to not only lose whole digit percentages of the workforce, but to pay out benefits as well. I won't even pretend to be an economist, so I could be wrong, but it's not intuitive we can run the money printer like this in the face of declining productivity due to people dropping out of the workforce.

We're still not done yet, Omicron looks likely to infect a lot of people, including those who are vaccinated (and especially those who aren't boosted). If long COVID is as prevalent as the WSJ believes, letting people not work will be a big problem, and paying benefits will be unthinkable. If we're at millions of people now, we'll easily be at tens of millions by the time Omicron makes the rounds.