Peak Covid season will hit every year. Workers, economy will pay

This year’s flu season is going to be “a whopper,” according to former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner and Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb. But it’s not 2021, or any single year health crisis, which is going to cause the biggest issues for the economy in a post-pandemic future. According to Gottlieb, it is the twin specter of an annual peak flu season and the beginning of a perennial peak Covid season which together will cost the economy and workers more than can be imagined.

Gottlieb told CNBC he believes the end of the pandemic phase of Covid-19 is in sight, but matching the outlook of many epidemiologists, he says the endemic phase is coming. Or in other words, Covid is never going away for good.

Much like the flu season, an annual Covid season should be expected, and businesses need to prepare for that, Gottlieb said during a recent video interview with CNBC’s Meg Tirrell. Covid will be a “persistent risk, persistent virus that circulates every year,” he said.

Already, the flu season costs businesses billions of dollars a year. According to employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the 2019-2020 flu season alone cost employers $13 billion, but the cost in lost output has ben as high as $21 billion in recent years.

“The total hit on public health and also productivity is going to be too great for us to sustain and just be ‘business as usual,'” Gottlieb said. Taking into account the tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect costs that the flu costs the economy annually, he said that adding Covid on top of this, “will just be too much to bear, in my view.” 

Right now, the U.S. is transitioning from the pandemic phase to the endemic phase of the virus. It is not yet clear the precise timing of that change. “It is going to be messy and it is going to be unclear,” he said. “We will know when we look back a few year from now.”

Because most workers aren’t back in the office yet, and most employers are not contemplating bringing everyone back into the office soon, they haven’t had to contemplate what happens when we go back in full time. “That’s more likely 2022,” he said. But Gottlieb added that he does believe we are now seeing the last major surge of infection during the pandemic phase, caused by Delta, and businesses do need to be thinking about the long-term.

“I don’t think that businesses have really undergone a very comprehensive approach to how they improve the work environment, the work flow,” he said. “We need to start thinking about this. It isn’t just improving the air system. It’s changing the work day. So that question becomes how do businesses deal with the fact that this is going to circulate at least on par with the flu.”

As this year’s flu season begins, here are a few of the ideas the former FDA commissioner highlighted that businesses need to start…