Healthcare worker absenteeism, child care costs, and COVID-19 school closures: a simulation analysis

Elizabeth T Chin; Benjamin Q Huynh; Nathan C Lo; Trevor Hastie; Sanjay Basu

2. Difficulty finding child care could be estimated from the household structure of healthcare workers. To simulate household statistics of healthcare workers, we use nationally representative microdata from IPUMS. We take employed healthcare workers who are either the head of the household or the partner of the head of the household and extract the 1 China's Center for Disease Control reported a 0.9% case fatality with no reported comorbidities and 7.3% and 10.5% for comorbidities of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, respectively. 6 age, relationship, and employment status of each member of the household. We estimate the ability to find child care by identifying other members of a household that could provide care. We define alternative child care as any member within the household that is over 13 and not employed (under 16, unemployed, or not in the labor force). We stratify the data by state, sex, occupation (practitioner or support staff), and partnership status (single or couple) to estimate the state-specific family structures of healthcare workers. We weight these state-specific derived rates of unmet child care need based on county-level demographic information to obtain estimates for each county.