This suggests that the second factor, fear, may be important in explaining America's shortage of staff. Nearly 4m people are not looking for work "because of the coronavirus pandemic", according to official data. And consider which industries are experiencing the most acute worker shortages. Jobs in health care, recreation and hospitality report the highest level of job openings, relative to employment. Many of these involve plenty of person-to-person contact, making their workers especially vulnerable to infection (a study from California earlier this year found that cooks were most at risk from dying of covid-19). By contrast, in industries where maintaining social distancing or being outside is often easier, labour shortages are less of an issue. The number of job openings per employee in the construction industry is lower today than it was before the pandemic.
这表明了第二个因素：担忧，这可能是解释美国劳动力短缺的一个重要原因。官方数据显示，有近400万人“因为新冠肺炎大流行”而没有找工作。再看看哪些行业正经历着最严重的劳动力短缺。相对于就业率而言，医疗保健、娱乐和酒店行业的职位空缺最高，其中许多都涉及大量的人际接触，以致于他们的工作人员特别容易受到感染(今年早些时候加州的一项研究发现，厨师死于新冠的风险最大)。相比之下，在那些更容易保持社交距离或外出的行业，劳动力短缺不是什么大问题。目前建筑业每名雇员的职位空缺数量比大流行前要少。
The final reason for worker shortages relates to the extraordinary reallocation of resources under way in the economy. The headline growth in vacancies represents the rise in opportunities in some industries—say, clerks in DIY stores—as others decline, reflecting changing consumer demands. Analysis by The Economist of over 400 local areas also finds a wide variation in job churn across geographies: the gap between jobs growth in the most buoyant areas and that in struggling ones is twice as wide as it was before the pandemic. Workers may take time to catch up with this creative destruction. A former bartender looking for work in downtown Manhattan, for instance, may not quickly spot and secure a position as a delivery driver in farther-out Westchester.
劳动力短缺的最后一个原因与经济中正在进行的资源的异常重新配置有关。空缺职位的总体增长代表了某些行业机会的增加——比如DIY商店的店员——而其他行业的机会却在减少，这反映了消费者需求的变化。《经济学人》对400多个地区的分析也发现，不同地区的就业岗位有很大差异：就业增长最活跃地区和困难地区之间的差距是疫情爆发前的两倍。工人们可能需要时间来赶上这种创造性破坏。比如，一个在曼哈顿市中心找工作的前酒保可能无法在再远一点的威彻斯特迅速找到并获得送货司机的职位。
As vaccinations continue to reduce hospitalisations and deaths from covid-19, and limit the spread of the disease, Americans' fears about taking high-contact jobs should fade too. But if shortages are to dissipate fully, and the threat of inflation is to be contained, some of the unemployed will also have to take up work in sectors and areas that are new to them.
随着疫苗的接种，因新冠住院和死亡的人数持续减少，同时该疾病的传播也得到了限制，美国人对于从事高接触性工作的恐惧也应该会消退。但是，想要完全消除短缺并控制住通货膨胀的威胁，一些失业者也将不得不在他们不熟悉的行业和领域工作。
