The author links to FRED data that measure a 5% drop in workforce participation in the 55+ cohort. This is at least some evidence that older workers are taking it easy so far. (See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ if you have not heard of FRED before.)
I think we all know why the 55+ year olds are seeing a dip - they have an exponentially higher chance of dying of Covid. A bit weird for such an obvious fact to not have been verbalized in the article. If anything, the graph above actually contradicts the title of the article - from what I can tell, all other age groups seem way more employed than I would have expected given the logistical and health concerns that the pandemic threw at us.
I could not find a precise definition of what the graph shows, but that's a graph of participation rate and not absolute numbers. I.e., of all the people who are alive at a certain time, what percentage are neither employed nor unemployed (where "unemployed" implies "looking for a job"). To confuse things even more, the whole percentage is normalized to Mar 2020=100.
Your estimate of the mortality in that cohort is likely off by an order of magnitude or more. I can't find an exact figure, so here is a back of the envelope estimate. https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ tells me that about 30,000 more people of age 45-64 died in 2020 in excess of a typical year. For the purpose of estimation, I assume as a worst case that they all were 55+ and that the number of 65+ people working is not too large. How many 55-64 people exist in Europe? The euromomo graph refers to a region of about 400M people. For the purpose of this estimation, assume that people live 100 years and that age distribution is uniform, so maybe 40M are in that age range. Thus, the extra mortality in 2020 would be less than 0.1%. You can criticize this analysis in many ways, but it's hard to believe that I am off by more than a factor of 5 in either direction. Thus, I don't see how "dead by covid" can possibly justify a 5% decrease in participation rate.
I honestly have a hard time following your math and don't have the time to find where the bug lies - but if you're going to deny that Covid has a more severe impact on older people, then we should just save each other time and agree to disagree.
Oh, I am not denying at all that Covid has a more severe impact on older people.
I am just saying that, looking at the data, maybe 0.1% of the 55+ workers died of Covid, and so Covid by itself does not explain the 5% drop in the FRED graph. Maybe part of the disconnect is that Covid disproportionately affects people too old to be in the workforce?
And I wasn't saying that the dip is because those people are no longer alive, but because they are just trying to be more careful and therefore avoiding exposure since they can afford to do so financially.
