The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a heavy blow to the workforce in the U.S. that it is still recoiling from. As companies struggle to fill openings, there is a question of whether “long COVID” is to blame for keeping more Americans out of work.

On Tuesday, Axios reported that as many as 1.6 million workers could be missing from the labor market because of long COVID, accounting for upwards of 15% of unfilled jobs. This claim was supported by an estimate from Katie Bach, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who examined the impact long COVID has had on the labor force.

Long COVID refers to the lasting symptoms of COVID-19 that remain with patients after they recover from the virus. Survivors of COVID-19 have reported experiencing an array of symptoms even after recovering from the virus itself. These "long haulers" report experiencing symptoms that include extreme fatigue, headaches, dizziness, "brain fog" and difficulty breathing for months after their initial infection.

But despite increased awareness of these lasting effects, available data on long COVID is not consistent enough to provide a portrait of the problem’s extent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the data varies wildly from 5% to 80% on how many survivors of COVID-19 experience its aftereffects. In a September survey, the CDC reported that two out of three respondents who experience the virus had symptoms that lasted for more than four weeks after the initial infection.

This lack of clarity into just how prevalent long COVID symptoms are in patients has turned it into an under-discussed topic, said Bach.

“One problem is that we lack data: we aren’t tracking the economic impact,” Bach wrote on Twitter on Jan. 11.

There are several efforts by research centers with the support of the federal government to try and understand the extent of long COVID, but until then it leaves open the question of how much COVID-19 continues to affect workers. This makes every aspect of the labor shortage "more severe," Bach told Axios.

The U.S. economy has been beset by a stubborn labor shortage that has contributed to higher inflation across the country. Millions of Americans quit their jobs last year and are instead parlaying demand for their labor for jobs with higher pay and better benefits, or choosing to be self-employed instead.

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