Continuing coronavirus happenings (Part 4)

Time to flip over the envelope and do some figgerin’…

The :us: has had ~1.13 million die, and there are 4.6m people missing from the civilian labour force, about 2.8% at this point.

The :cn: official death toll is so silly I won’t repeat it. It has been thoroughly debunked by George Calhoun (archive link to Forbes article), but the crude estimate end of 2021 was 950,000; call it 1.3m today.

I’m thinking that is low by 2 to 4 times…

The World Bank puts the Chinese labour force at 800m in 2019 (slightly higher participation rate than the U.S., but plausible). That drops by 8m to 792m in 2020, and by 0.4m in 2021. I’m not sure I believe that 2021 figure, but let’s say the same drop happened this year and 1.2% of the labour force is missing.

If we assume similar deaths to labour force impact as the U.S., then the labour force drop alone suggests the Chinese death toll is probably around 2.2m people already. The Chinese are very likely making their labour force numbers look good. If we assume the real drop is the 2.8% number from the U.S., that suggests 5.6m dead, and a 22.4m drop in labour force.

India seems to be missing 3.2% (World Bank) of its labour force as of end of 2021, so my using the U.S. figure for China might be generous. Estimates of 2.7m dead in India as of end of August 2021 suggest the ratio of labour force decline to deaths ratio is similar to the U.S., so I don’t feel too far out of bounds applying either to China.

All of this is very rough.

Another 2m deaths in China would be roughly another ~8m missing from the labour force.

Their economy isn’t going to come roaring back from that any time soon.

Edit: And if the real figure is even close to the 5.6m dead suggested by the labour force numbers, then another 2m dead is probably looking inevitable, and lower economic disruption like the path of least resistance.

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