What he predicted Chamath argued that once COVID vaccines and a Tamiflu‑like oral antiviral were widely available, COVID would be economically “like a flu”: worker absenteeism from COVID would fall materially and most of the economy would return to normal levels of on‑site work and activity.

1. Preconditions were met

• COVID vaccines were already widely available in the U.S. by 2021.
• The FDA authorized the first oral antiviral, Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir/ritonavir), on Dec. 22, 2021, and molnupiravir on Dec. 23, 2021, for early outpatient treatment of high‑risk patients. By mid‑2022 these drugs were no longer in short supply and were sitting on pharmacy shelves, according to contemporaneous reporting. So his trigger condition did occur.

2. Acute crisis and broad economic drag did largely fade

• The WHO ended COVID’s status as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 5, 2023, noting over a year of declining deaths, reduced pressure on health systems, and “a downward trend…allowing most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID‑19.”
• The U.S. terminated its national and public‑health emergencies in April–May 2023; by then unemployment was back around its pre‑pandemic lows and labor‑market indicators showed a tight labor market rather than COVID‑driven weakness.
• Sectors that were previously devastated by restrictions (air travel, tourism, hospitality) had largely recovered to or exceeded 2019 activity by 2023–24.

This part of his intuition—no more rolling shutdowns or macro‑scale COVID drag once vaccines and treatments were in place—was broadly correct.

3. On‑site work did not return to “normal levels” Where the prediction clearly fails is his expectation that this would restore normal pre‑COVID levels of on‑site work. The data show a large, persistent structural shift to remote/hybrid work:

• Before COVID, full days worked from home were about 7% of paid workdays (2019).
• By mid‑2023, that share stabilized around 28% of paid workdays—roughly four times the pre‑pandemic level—and BLS summarized that high work‑from‑home rates “persist in 2023.”
• WFH Research and related surveys show this plateau has continued: about 27–28% of paid days were worked from home in 2024–2025, indicating a new steady state rather than a reversion.
• Stanford economist Nick Bloom and co‑authors characterize return‑to‑office as having hit a new normal: roughly 60% of workers fully on‑site, ~30% hybrid, ~10% fully remote, not a full reversion to 2019 patterns.

So while most workers are physically on‑site again, the level of on‑site work is nowhere near “normal” pre‑COVID levels for large swaths of the economy. Remote/hybrid work has become a durable structural change—very unlike flu seasons, which never produced a comparable, lasting shift in where work is done.

4. Worker absenteeism and long‑COVID make it not flu‑like Chamath’s argument explicitly tied “like a flu” to reduced ability for people to stay away from work. The reality is more complicated:

• Acute illness absenteeism did spike dramatically during Omicron: in January 2022, 7.8 million U.S. workers missed work for illness or medical reasons, more than double January 2021, with 3.6 million not working at all that week. That was an extreme COVID‑driven peak.
• Those spikes have subsided as immunity and treatments improved, and there have not been repeated Omicron‑scale absenteeism waves—but COVID has left a large chronic footprint via long COVID:
  • Brookings estimates from 2022–2023 suggest long COVID may be keeping 1.6–4 million full‑time‑equivalent workers out of the U.S. labor force at any given time—potentially around 15% of the then‑current labor shortage.
  • Government and clinical overviews likewise estimate millions of Americans with persistent symptoms, with roughly 1 million or more adults no longer able to work due to long COVID.

Seasonal influenza causes absenteeism but has never produced this scale of persistent labor‑force loss or long‑term disability in modern data. COVID’s ongoing impact on who can work, and how much, is structurally larger than a typical flu season, even after vaccines and antivirals.

Bottom line

• It is true that once vaccines and oral antivirals were available and widely deployed, the acute emergency phase ended and broad economic activity largely normalized.
• But the core, stronger claim—that COVID’s economic impact would become flu‑like, with worker absenteeism no longer a meaningful issue and on‑site work returning to normal pre‑COVID levels—has not come to pass. Remote/hybrid work remains about four times higher than before, and long COVID continues to sideline a non‑trivial slice of the workforce in a way that has no parallel with seasonal flu.

Because those central, falsifiable aspects of his prediction are not borne out by the data, the best overall judgment is that the prediction is wrong, albeit directionally right about the end of the emergency phase.