Incapacity and Consequences

(GIF from Gifer)

Some people get the rug pulled out from under them. When people get blindsided by a life-altering hit to their health, everything about what they can and cannot do has to be recalibrated. It may even fluctuate from one day to another, or within each day. Multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus, injury in an accident, or some other unexpected wallop inflict some measure of incapacity, but have not been terribly common. As I’ve said before, Long COVID is going to make that much more common than in recent pre-pandemic memory.

But not everywhere, and that will reshape the world.

Reduced Capacity as a Norm

Society in general isn’t set up to treat this as normal. The norm is supposed to be reasonably good health, reasonably good and steady capabilities, and reasonable stamina, until old age. At least, we ended 2019 with this as the norm in developed countries.

Not so long ago, it wasn’t the norm. Illness, injury, dietary deficiencies, and partial disability were widespread. For the USA in 1900, average life expectancy was 46 for men and 48 for women. By 1960 it had risen to 67 for men, 73 for women. By 2019 it was 76 for men, 81 for women.

The pandemic reversed that trend, reducing life expectancy in many countries. In the USA it quickly lopped off about a year, and in the UK slightly more.

COVID also reduces the capacities of many of its survivors. Long COVID is a colloquial term for lingering health problems after acute COVID akin to, sometimes more extensive or more severe than, all but the worst cases of myalgic encephalomyelitis (M.E.). It is most likely after mild or asymptomatic COVID. It disproportionately affects people in their prime years, from late teens to late forties. Vaccination reduces incidence but does not block it.

This will drag down productivity.

The USA is such a juggernaut, it isn’t glaringly obvious there yet. But UK worker productivity was near the bottom of the G7 countries before Brexit and the pandemic. Having people lose some or all of their ability to produce will show up quickly. In a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a quarter of UK employers reported Long COVID is now a major cause of long term worker absence, and half of employers reported having staff affected by Long COVID in the previous year. The UK’s Office for National Statistics, which produces highly reliable COVID prevalence data, calculates more than 1 person out of every 50 in the UK has it.

Some of the stricken need support to get through daily life, so they have gone from being part of the producing workforce to needing help from those who are still able to work.

But Not Everywhere

If the entire world faced the same problem, the international playing field would not shift much. But some countries did not let the virus run rampant. Those countries now have a competitive advantage over harder-hit countries. Their advantage increases with every wave of cases in countries that are not mitigating the spread of disease. Each wave not only kills more people, but also leaves more people with long term impairment.

In this light, China’s obsession with keeping the pandemic down makes perfect sense. Letting a large portion of such a large population be knocked to their knees by the virus for the long term would be devastating. Instead, they have kept their population less affected than most other countries. We can see evidence of it in their life expectancy, which continues to rise despite the pandemic.

That is not an aberration. New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore… Such countries went to great lengths to keep the pandemic down. (Singapore implemented the pandemic plan the UK had devised but chose not to use.) Like China, these countries have continued to experience an increase in life expectancy despite the pandemic.

With the exception of places where war or natural disaster stepped in, the pattern of life expectancy over the past few years is a proxy for how well a nation has dealt with the pandemic, how productive its workforce can still be, and how much of an advantage their workforce now has against the workforce in more heavily affected countries.

Stealthy Consequences

China had already built impressive economic might in recent years. Initially, it did so by working cheaply at high volume.

The Chinese now have the world’s largest workforce that has come through the past couple of years with little impairment.

Their capacities are almost entirely intact thanks to aggressive handling of the pandemic. (A colleague went to China last year for the long-delayed completion of some factory automation work. Their quarantine and work protocols were amazingly stringent. In some ways that was miserable for him, but it was effective.)

As for the small countries that similarly protected their people? They now occupy a new competitive niche.

The stealthiest aspect of Long COVID is that many people who have it don’t realize they have it. Cognitive deficits and damage to what doctors call executive function especially affect the most demanding types of work and are the hardest for people to realize they have.

So far we don’t have proper studies about the impact on work output. We have anecdotes about such mishaps as a lawyer’s simple mistake that delayed a proceeding by 10 weeks. Anybody can make a mistake, but mistakes are becoming more frequent. We don’t yet know how much more frequent or how much more serious they are becoming. We haven’t changed our procedures to double check each other more routinely, and not every line of work has built-in testing or quality assurance stages to catch most errors before they can wreak havoc.

If you need something done that requires mental acuity and high throughput, where will you want to turn? To a workforce where the new normal has more mistakes and lower productivity? Or a workforce that can still perform as well as in 2019?

This will reshape international business. It may be subtle at first, under the radar, discussed only in tightly confidential circles. But eventually it will become visible. By reshaping business, it will reshape the political landscape too.

Those who see it coming and adapt now will benefit. Those who don’t… won’t.