There are some 3.6 million fewer workers now than there were in February 2020, according to government data. By some measures, the number is much larger and could be 6 million, according to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.

The majority of the missing workforce are people 55 and older — some 2.4 million people — who either retired early by choice because they could financially or low-income retirement-age workers who were axed at the start of the outbreak.

COVID-19 nearly doubled the retirement rate for 2020, fueling the largest exit of older workers from the workforce in at least 50 years, according to Siavash Radpour, associate research director of the Retirement Equity Lab at The New School.

There’s also the simple, tragic fact that the pandemic has claimed 800,000 lives — and about half a million of those victims were working-age adults, Zandi estimates.