I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.

If you're a regular listener of Pitchwork Economics, you know that we've talked a bit about

how weird this economy is right now, how different our inflation is from past inflations,

bizarre it is to have people talking about recession in the midst of a record low unemployment

and record high job reports. And there's a lot of reasons why this might be happening.

One of them that we feel hasn't gotten enough attention at least from the economic perspective

is the impact of long COVID. Perhaps tens of millions of Americans have in the past are now

suffering from long COVID symptoms. And it's surely had an impact on the labor shortage we've

been experiencing. And the economy as a whole, how much an impact has not been clear. But there's

actually some new numbers out and a new report by a previous Pitchwork Economics guest Katie Bach

at the Brookings Institute. And we're really fortunate to talk with Katie today about long COVID.

It's economic impact and it's very real impact on quality of life.

My name is Katie Bach. I am a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings

Institution where I research topics related to job quality, low wage work, and increasingly

long COVID. Well, thank you for coming back. We talked to you. I believe it was January.

I lose track of time. There's no time in the era of COVID anymore. It all runs together.

And at the time, we were talking about why companies can't self-regulate their way to

inclusive capitalism. And in our conversation, the issue of long COVID came up. And there was

the question of whether it was worsening the labor shortage and nobody really knew at the time.

But there is new data. Could you tell us a bit about what we've learned?

Absolutely. So at the end of 2021, someone asked me what I thought the impact of long COVID

on the labor market was. And I was like, honestly, probably nothing. I mean, I just can't imagine

...