The pandemic was 5 years ago and Covid was and is very mild in younger people. So many younger people officially unfit to work is not due to Covid and I am very skeptical that this is really "health" as I explained. So do you have anything substantive to share on this instead of taking government statements at face value and snarks in replies?
1) it is absurd to consider the pandemic as a point in time in the past. It has abated, but there are still new cases today, and ongoing consequences of older cases. "it happened 5 years ago" is simplistic to the point of being nonsensical.
2) The report states "Today there are nearly 800,000 or 40% more people of working-age who are economically inactive for health reasons than there were in 2019."
So it's a change since in 2019. The time frame fits.
> is very mild in younger people
Always? Blanket statements like this are not accurate.
> So do you have anything substantive to share on this instead of taking statements at face value
I did not "accept it at face value". My point is: here is data in need of explanation. A possible explanation is that "is very mild in younger people" is not true often enough to matter.
I am amazed at people's ability to not even consider the obvious simple explanation - not accept it, but not even consider it or talk about it - and rather leap to ignoring the elephant in the room, and denying the validity of the data as first choice.
Correlation is not causation, but if it's not the cause then that should be conclusion reached only after investigating and ruling out the glaringly obvious.
> I am very skeptical that this is really "health"
That is a extra-ordinary statement, with zero evidence. If you can't provide that, we can dismiss it out of hand.
> taking government statements at face value
Please, no snark. The UK isn't the USA, statements from public health bodies can't be dismissed by using "government statements" as an implied slur. Your explanation "it's not health" is a political one, and so you imply that this does not come from you - that the number is itself pollical.
> A possible explanation is that "is very mild in younger people" is not true often enough to matter.
It is true enough to matter unless you can show otherwise... because, again, to be deemed unfit to work the health issue must be very serious.
And of course this is all political.
Those numbers, criteria, and decisions to deem people "economically inactive" and not to count them as unemployed are all based on policy. Again, cynically we need to keep in mind that this keeps unemployment numbers low when the economy is flat-lining (really the actual elephant in the room since 2019).
We can't ignore the state of the economy and the political aspect. This Keep Britain Working review is political (it is a government review) and the proposal that "firms were likely to face a cost of £5-15 per employee per month to provide improved levels of occupational health is farcical and suggests that real issues are avoided (c.f. previous paragraph).
The rise in economic inactivity also seems to be UK-specific, which also points to reasons beyond Covid and "health" [1]...
Anyway, can only lead a horse to water, so have a nice one...
> The rise in economic inactivity also seems to be UK-specific, which also points to reasons beyond Covid and "health"
Thanks for the link. It's good that it talks about things in context of the pandemic, since discussing public health without even mentioning it would be nonsensical. From there:
> And ill-health has consistently been a bigger factor behind inactivity in the UK than in most other advanced economies, with post-pandemic trends likely to have amplified these differences.
So, that supports the first part of your sentence - it seems to be UK-specific, but it directly contradicts the second. Which is still your own unsupported extraordinary conclusions that it's not health and unrelated to the pandemic.
It's a mystery. We may never know what caused a steep and broad rise in ill health during the pandemic.
/s