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A Speeding Rate Starts to Slow: COVID-19 Mortality Rates by State
The cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate of the United States has doubled or more each week between February 29, 2020 and April 12, 2020. Thankfully, doubling has stopped in several states as of April 12, 2020. One of these states, Louisiana, had the third-highest COVID-19 mortality rate in the country. In the Cleveland Fed’s District,1 the growth in mortality rates has continued to slow in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia, but not in Pennsylvania. However, in most states mortality rates are still rising rapidly—mortality rates doubled or more between April 5, 2020 and April 12, 2020 in 37 ...
Age-adjusted COVID-19 Mortality Rates by Demographic Groups
A noteworthy aspect of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic is the disproportionate effect of the virus on people of different age groups. The elderly have a higher risk of mortality than working-age adults, and they also face a higher mortality risk than children (CDC, 2020). Figure 1 shows the monthly age-specific crude mortality rates (CMRs) by age group for the United States during 2020 and 2021. One can see that the mortality rates of children (0 to 17 years) and young adults (18 to 29 years) are essentially flat, with 1 death per million children and at most 14 deaths per million young ...
Were Fourth District Local Governments Ready for a Recession? How the Great Recession Influenced How Much They Save
While almost no one anticipated the pandemic-induced shutdown of economic activity experienced this year, local government officials know that the business cycle will sooner or later pull down tax revenues. During years of expansion, cities and counties should be setting aside resources that will enable them to lessen the cuts necessary to balance their budgets during a recession. How prepared were the local governments of the Cleveland Fed’s Fourth District for the COVID-19 crisis?1 Looking at the most recent data available for a sample of the District’s largest cities and counties, we ...
Disruptions Are Expected to Persist, Prompting Some Firms to Rethink Supply Chain Management
Despite business leaders’ expectations that supply chain challenges would have subsided by now, supply chains remain disrupted, in some cases to an even greater degree than earlier in the pandemic. The sources of the disruption reportedly vary from firm to firm and product to product, and they also change from week to week, but business contacts and analysts have argued that limited labor supply, port congestion1 and other transportation bottlenecks, and strong demand for goods each play a role.
Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Cause an Urban Exodus?
One constant through the upheavals of 2020 was the steady stream of media reports about residents’ fleeing dense urban areas. In this data brief, I use the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) and find that migration flows were in fact very unfavorable for urban neighborhoods in 2020. However, people’s taking flight from urban areas is only part of the story.
Fourth District Business Response to COVID-19: Early Findings
The coronavirus outbreak has landed hard on economic activity in the Fourth Federal Reserve District. Businesses in the region, which encompasses Ohio, western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky, and the northern panhandle of West Virginia, are experiencing many challenges—a sharp pullback in demand, the need to furlough workers and shutter factories, and a cloud of uncertainty hanging over their outlooks for recovery.
Demographic Trends Are Major Factors in Today’s Weak Labor Force Growth
The size of the US labor force declined by 2.3 million people between December 2019 and December 2021, sparking widespread debate about the underlying factors constraining labor supply. Broadly speaking, changes in the overall size of the labor force come from changes in labor force participation rates (LFPRs), changes in the demographic makeup of the population, and changes in the size of the population. Research has documented the role of changes in LFPRs, especially the jump in the number of retired people (Briggs, 2021; Faria e Castro, 2021; and Kaplan et al., 2021) and the drop in the ...
How Large Are the American Rescue Plan Fund Distributions to State and Local Governments?
In March of this year, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) authorized the US Department of the Treasury to distribute $350 billion to state and local governments through the legislation’s Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) to help speed the nation’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, candidates and advocates have stepped forward to say what community challenges they will solve with the funds. When we hear that a county is receiving $500 million and a state is receiving $5 billion, both figures sound very large, but what we don’t know is how much ...
Getting to Accuracy: Measuring COVID-19 by Mortality Rates and Percentage Changes
Comparing the trajectory of the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States to that of other countries can provide important insights into how the virus is progressing in the United States and the effectiveness of our response. The quality of those insights depends on the data we choose to compare and how we conduct that comparison. This report argues that cumulative mortality rates and their percentage changes are the best available measures for comparing the trajectory of the epidemic in different countries. Based on these measures, the epidemic in the United States has a similar mortality rate ...
COVID-19 and Supply Chains: A Year of Evolving Disruption
The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland regularly surveys a broad cross-section of businesses in the region it serves and convenes business advisory councils in eight of the region’s major metropolitan areas. The information collected through these surveys and conversations points to trends that are not yet apparent in the data and fills gaps in researchers’ understanding of our region’s economy. The information is helpful to Federal Reserve policymakers during their discussions about the nation’s monetary policy. Anecdotes herein have been edited for length and clarity.