- Is anyone [in your household] deaf or does anyone have serious difficulty hearing?
- Is anyone blind or does anyone have serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses?
- Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does anyone have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?
- Does anyone have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs?
- Does anyone have difficulty dressing or bathing?
- Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does anyone have difficulty doing errands alone such as visiting a doctor’s office or shopping?
If the answer to one or more of those is yes, the person is counted as disabled. Here’s how the responses have changed over the course of the pandemic:
Having trouble concentrating, remembering or making decisions (I lopped off that last bit in the table to make it more readable) tracks well with the common Long Covid symptom known as “brain fog.” Fatigue and difficulty breathing, two other top Long Covid symptoms, are less directly addressed by the disability questions, although they might be reflected in difficulty doing errands alone and walking or climbing stairs. Hearing problems such as tinnitus have also been associated with Covid, although they aren’t near the top of the list of lingering symptoms.
The craziness of the past couple of years is another possible cause of all that brain fog, as well as of the kind of anxiety that might keep one from venturing out on errands. But another survey that the Census Bureau started conducting early in the pandemic points to a Covid connection.
Since January 2021, the online Household Pulse Survey has included a question about past Covid-19 diagnoses, and since April 2021 it has included questions similar to the first four disability queries in the CPS, albeit with multiple choice answers rather than yes-no. The percentage of respondents reporting severe problems remembering or concentrating has gone up both among those who’ve definitely had Covid and those who probably haven’t, but it’s higher and the rise has been steeper among the first group.
On the basis of the Household Pulse responses, the Census Bureau estimated that during the survey period of April 27 through May 9 of this year, 5.1 million Americans aged 18 and older had a previous Covid-19 diagnosis and (2) severe difficulty with remembering or concentrating. A lot of those memory and concentration problems likely predated Covid, and big changes in response rates over time make it hard to compare estimates from the most recent Household Pulse surveys with those from spring 2021. But my back-of-the-envelope estimate from the Household Pulse results is that overall about 2.2 million more U.S. adults are complaining of severe brain-fog-like problems now than in spring 2021. The CPS-based estimate, recorded in the table above, is that there are 1.2 million more than before the pandemic.
Neither of those is 20 million, or even seven million, but it’s a lot of people and the number could keep growing. This accounting may also miss many who are suffering from fatigue, breathing or other Long Covid complaints not captured so well by the surveys. Neither the Household Pulse survey nor the CPS — including the set of pandemic-related questions added to it in May 2020 — addresses Long Covid much more directly than this. Even the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes organized by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis, which has focused on some important Covid-related topics that government surveys have not, has so far avoided health questions out of concern that, as Bloom put it in an email, they were “maybe too sensitive to include in the survey.”
Barrero, Bloom and Davis did conclude recently that what they called “Long Social Distancing,” prompted in part by concerns about catching Covid-19, is depressing the 16-and-older U.S. labor-force participation rate by about 2.5 percentage points, which adds up to more than six million people. The Long Covid effect is probably smaller than that: In a January Brookings Institution report, jobs expert (and pizza-company executive) Katie Bach estimated on the basis of several studies that it was costing the U.S. labor market about 1.6 million full-time equivalent workers, which seems to be in the same ballpark as what I found. That’s still enough to have an impact, especially at a time when available jobs are more plentiful than people looking for them — as Bach put, it’s equivalent to about 15% of all unfilled U.S. jobs.
And discussing this purely in terms of how it has affected employment and labor-force participation is probably a mistake. My reading of the disability data is that the majority of people with Long Covid-like symptoms are still working, and I imagine that even most of those with debilitating cases would prefer not to check out of the labor force for good.
There do, however, seem to be a lot of Long Covid sufferers who could use some help. Which brings me back to Social Security Disability Insurance, a program that has long been criticized for disconnecting recipients from the labor market. In 2010, economists David Autor and Mark Duggan proposed a new approach that would offer:
- Workplace accommodations, rehabilitation services, partial income support, and other services to workers who suffer work limitations, with the goal of enabling them to remain in employment;
- Financial incentives to employers to accommodate workers who become disabled and minimize movements of workers from their payrolls onto the SSDI system
With encouragement from Congress, the Social Security Administration has been undertaking some experiments along these lines. Long Covid seems like good reason to speed up the process.