The Effects of Employment on Influenza Rates

Abstract

The seasonal influenza virus afflicts millions of people in the U.S. population each year, imposing significant costs on those who fall ill, their families, employers, and the health care system. The flu is transmitted via droplet spread or close contact, and certain environments, such as schools or offices, promote transmission. In this paper, we examine whether increases in employment are associated with increased incidence of the flu. We use state-level data on the prevalence of the flu from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In our preferred specification, we find that a one percentage point increase in the employment rate increases the number of influenza related doctor visits by about 16 percent, and these effects are highly pronounced in the retail sector and healthcare sector, the sectors with the highest levels of interpersonal contact.

Business Shutdowns and COVID-19 Mortality

“…Instead, shutting down construction and low-tech manufacturing activities -in which interpersonal contact is limited to workers in the same unit -only has mild effects, while the shutdown of the high-tech manufacturing sector -where a high share of work can be done digitally (Manyika et al, 2015), thus minimizing interpersonal contact even more -is completely ineffective. 1 This heterogeneity in the effectiveness of business shutdowns across sectors is consistent with the notion that a higher degree of interpersonal contact between workers and customers can facilitate the spread of infectious diseases (see Dingel and Neiman, 2020;Markowitz et al, 2019;Lewandowski et al, 2020, among others).…”

The socio-economic determinants of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic

“…Economic performance: We evaluate the economic performance of a country through 6 variables. This performance often mirrors the country's ability to intervene in a case of a public health crisis [38][39][40][41][42]. Variables such as GDP per capita have been used in modeling health outcomes, mortality trends, cause-specific mortality estimation and health system performance and finances [43,44].…”

“…The more egalitarian income distribution within a rich country is associated with better health of population [48][49][50][51]. Nevertheless, it is also known that in better economies the trade interactions and mobility of people is faster, which may enhance the propagation of an transmitted disease [17,19,42,52,53].…”

Impacts of Social and Economic Factors on the Transmission of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China

“…Additionally, literature find that epidemics spread faster during economic booms (Adda, 2016), increases in employment are associated with increased incidence of influenza (Markowitz et al, 2010), and growth in trade can significantly increase the spread of influenza (Adda, 2016) and HIV (Oster, 2012). Vaccination (Maurer, 2009, White, 2019 and sunlight exposure (Slusky and Zeckhauser, 2018) are also found effective in reducing the spread of influenza.…”