Post-Pandemic COVID-19 linked with high numbers of workforce absences and exits

Well after the United States government declared the pandemic emergency over, COVID-19 continued to cause about the same number of monthly work absences year-round as occurred during peak influenza months, a team that includes Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) researchers has found. The study was published Oct. 10 in JAMA Network Open.

The researchers began the project to understand the virus’s lingering effects after the pandemic’s official end in May 2023.

“The adverse impacts of the pandemic on the labor market had been previously explored, but it was unclear if these issues had continued through 2024,” said Dr. Julia Dennett, PhD, the paper’s lead author and a postdoctoral associate in the YSPH Department of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) when the research was conducted. She is now at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany.

The team studied week-long work absences for health reasons and workers who were out of the labor force the month after such an absence. They used a large national sample of data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics representing about 158.4 million workers as of February 2020.

The researchers divided the data into three periods: pre-pandemic (January 2015 to February 2020), pandemic (March 2020 to April 2023), and post-pandemic (May 2023 to December 2024). To determine COVID’s possible effect, they subtracted monthly health-related absences from before the pandemic with those during and after. They also tracked COVID, influenza A and B, and RSV levels in wastewater starting when this information became available in January 2022. This was to ensure COVID, and not these other viruses, was responsible for workforce absences and exits.

The researchers found health-related absences tracked most closely with higher levels of COVID in wastewater. As they expected, absences were highest during the pandemic. But they found absences stayed high in the post-pandemic period, with an average of 1.07 million each month in 2024. This is essentially the same number as that for peak months (December to February) of a typical flu season.

“We were told COVID is over and we don’t have to worry about COVID anymore, but perturbations in the labor market are persisting over time,” said Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) and the paper’s senior author. “We documented work absences comparable to those seen during flu seasons extending across the entire year as the new baseline.”

Over the full post-pandemic period, health-related absences were 12.9% and job exits 13.1% higher than before the pandemic. But workers in different fields were affected differently. The rates for workers unlikely to contract COVID on the job decreased to pre-pandemic levels, but rates stayed higher for groups whose working conditions put them at risk for infection. Absences were 8.1% higher for workers unlikely to be able to work from home and 12.5% higher for workers whose jobs required them to be physically close to other workers.

Gonsalves hopes the research can be used to reduce workplace COVID transmissions through, for example, better ventilation and leave policies to prevent sick workers from infecting others.

“This labor data is really important in helping us to track what’s going on epidemiologically in this country,” he said. “We should be thinking about how we can better use the myriad of data sources at our disposal to understand the societal impacts of epidemics, outbreaks, and pandemics.”

Dr. Evan Soltas, PhD, now Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, Dr. Gopi Shah Goda, PhD, Alice M. Rivlin Chair in Economic Policy at the Brookings Institution, Kevin Werner, formerly a Research Associate at the Urban Institute, and Thomas Thornhill IV, lecturer, Health Policy & Management at YSPH, were also co-authors.