The upshot of all this is depressingly clear. Despite hopes earlier this year that mass vaccination would finally break the link between the pandemic and the economy, this hasn’t happened—not yet, at least. According to the Labor Department’s monthly survey of households, which is part of the employment report, the number of people saying that they had been unable to work because their employer closed or lost business rose from 5.2 million in July to 5.6 million in August. Yet another sure sign that the Delta variant is biting: the rate of participation in the labor force among women aged twenty and over, which fell sharply in the early months of the pandemic before rebounding somewhat, slipped again last month.

The good news? “There isn’t any,” Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a circular to his clients this weekend. “September likely will be weak too, and we’re becoming nervous about the prospects for a decent revival in October, given that behavior lags cases, and cases are yet to peak.” This pessimism could turn out to be justified, but it isn’t universal. “The August employment report was very reminiscent of April payrolls, when employment slowed sharply, only to rebound within the next two months,” Aneta Markowska and Thomas Simons, two economists at the investment bank Jefferies, wrote in another analysis out on Friday. “If anything, this one will likely be followed by an even quicker/sharper rebound given the likely influx of labor supply in September.”