As vaccination rates increase, Laura Dresser said, more people may enter the labor market in the coming months. But that will probably be gradual because of challenges like lost child care access and the realization that “returning to work without health insurance suddenly makes less sense,” she added.
“It will take a sense of safety, or a sense of the quality of the job, of a lot of kids going back to school or child care centers opening to put people in the same relationship to work that they were in before the pandemic,” Dresser said.