Yale School of Public Health 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.