The Impact of School Closure for COVID-19 on the US Healthcare Workforce and the Net Mortality Effects

Jude Bayham; Eli P Fenichel

The first term, , is rarely calculated. Lempel, Epstein, and Hammond provide a preliminary estimate for school closures in the US of a 6-19% reduction in the healthcare workforce. 1 To provide detailed estimates, we use data from the US Current Population Survey (CPS) to quantify the impact of school closures on healthcare labor supply, . The CPS is an ongoing monthly survey of approximately 60,000 US households jointly administered by the US Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. We access the data via the Integrated Public Use Microdata. 10 We use the recent dataset, which includes information on just over 3 million individuals spread across 1.25 million households between January 2018-2020. The detailed data in the CPS allows us to characterize the family structure and likely withinhousehold childcare options for healthcare workers. It also enables us to describe the exposure to child care obligations for specific occupations within healthcare and across states. We calculate the share of healthcare provider households that are single parent, where a parent is defined to include head of household, opposite or same-sex spouse, partner or roommate, and an opposite or same-sex unmarried partner. We use the personal CPS sample weights for all calculations to ensure that the estimates are nationally representative.