Tracking Economic Fallout of COVID-19

The rapid pace in the escalation of the COVID-19 crisis in terms of both its health and economic effects has been unprecedented. The Bay Area Council Economic Institute is closely tracking the economic fallout with new data and short posts on www.bayareaeconomy.org. Data on unemployment released at the federal level shows that California has had over 2 million new unemployment claims in just the last three weeks. To put this number in perspective, the same level of job loss in California occurred over 28 weeks during the Great Recession. While the recovery from the Great Recession was slow—as many jobs never returned and people fell out of the labor pool—many economists predict a sharp rebound when the economy re-opens. The Economic Institute is working to better understand what a recovery in the Bay Area could look like and which structural economic changes produced by this crisis could stick for the long term.