Editor’s note: Morning Money is a free version of POLITICO Pro Financial Services morning newsletter, which is delivered to our s each morning at 5:15 a.m. The POLITICO Pro platform combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day’s biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro . It was fairly easy to measure Covid-19’s effect on the U.S. labor force in the early days of the pandemic. Offices closed, unemployment soared and service economy businesses – particularly those in leisure, hospitality and travel — shut down or limped along with fewer workers and limited operations. It’s harder now. Most state and local restrictions have been lifted. Unemployment is near historic lows and the labor force remains smaller than it was prior to the March 2020 shutdown. And while the latest data on job openings suggests the market has started to cool, there are still millions more openings in the U.S. than at any point in the decade prior to Covid-19’s arrival. That combination contributed to everything from rising household prices and understaffed restaurants to crowded airports and customer service delays. It has also left many economists wondering if they have the tools to account for Covid-19’s lingering impact on labor markets and workers. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation report says that anywhere from 10 million to 35 million working-age adults — as many as a third of all infections — are experiencing long Covid, a hazily defined ailment with symptoms that can include “brain fog,” shortness of breath, heart palpitations and neurological changes. Those symptoms can last anywhere from a few weeks to more than a year. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein that he has felt “ as if every nerve ending in my body has had five cups of coffee ” since his initial infection subsided in early 2020. The spectrum, severity and duration of symptoms — coupled with limited case data and inconsistent paid sick leave policies – have made it impossible for economists to establish the long-haul disease’s material effects on the labor force, RAND Corp. economist Kathryn Anne Edwards said during a live Twitter Spaces event hosted by POLITICO on Friday. “We're not great at counting who has long COVID because we don't have the means of doing so,” she said, adding that’s made it impossible to match how cases “would interact with the labor market because so many aspects of our labor markets differ so greatly in how they can accommodate a disability on the job.” That hasn’t stopped researchers from trying. A survey of long Covid patients published in The Lancet found that more than two-thirds of those surveyed required a reduced work schedule or had stopped working after becoming infected. The U.S. is still clocking around 120,000 new infections each day. If even a fraction of those become the type of long Covid cases that remove people from the labor market, its effect on workforce participation would be akin to that of a leaky stopper on a full bathtub. For now, estimates put the severity of the leakage to be anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million people, according to Edwards. In January, Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow Katie Bach attributed about 15 percent of job openings to long Covid — which translated to roughly 1.6 million positions at the time. Until the data improves, it’s unlikely the U.S. will grasp the pandemic’s bearing on labor markets and inflation. “We don't understand it,” Edwards said. “We certainly aren't making policy around it.” IT’S TUESDAY — Have a tip, story idea or other feedback for any of us? Hit us up at kdavidson@politico.com , ssutton@politico.com or aweaver@politico.com .
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