Honest question. Not political, I just don’t understand.
Imagine there’s a town of 1k people and they all serve each other – hospital workers, food service, etc. Then all 1k people die. Now there is no shortage of nurses and restaurant staff because there’s no one using the hospital or restaurant.
Now I understand that isn’t exactly what happened when a million Americans died of Covid-19. And I suspect certain types of people died with higher frequency leaving particular industries with a shortage (ie those with public-facing essential workers.) But is it that hard to shift? Say all the grocery workers died and now there’s no one to buy furniture, and the furniture store goes out of business. Well, the furniture workers could go work at the grocery store.
Or is it more like, people who work in general died, and those who don’t work survived and still need services? Regardless of whether people can’t work (ie they’re disabiled) or won’t (ie their dad got them a non-working, high-paid “job” in management?)
Surely I’m missing something, I would just like to know what it is.
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During natural disasters there is something called the “Harvesting Effect” – which basically says that most deaths from a natural disaster occur among people who were pretty close to dying anyways.
For example, heatwaves kill vast numbers of very old but “healthy” people who are basically bedridden. Those people can’t get or ask for water for themselves and their caregivers either don’t understand how much more water they need during the heatwave or aren’t around 24/7. That leads to those people dying from heatstroke and being counted as a heatwave death. But the reality is that they were all pretty likely to die from other causes at some point during the next few months, its just the heatwave that actually got them.
COVID saw the exact same effect – nearly everyone who died from COVID was in a health situation where they were likely to die at some point in the near future. That doesn’t mean everyone who died was like that, just that legitimately healthy people were the very rare exception.
What this means is that there weren’t actually many excess deaths from COVID above what would normally happen in any given year – the deaths just occurred a bit earlier than they otherwise would have.
The current labor shortage has nothing to do with that and is being caused by a catch up effect of the economy shutting down. There was a lot of work that needed to be performed during the shutdown that didn’t get performed, creating a giant backlog in every industry. People are now rushing to try to get 2 missed years worth of work done in addition to what normally needs to be done every year and there aren’t enough people around to do that.
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