Do you notice anything unusual in the graph above that occurred in the first quarter of 2022? This graph says that in January about 6% of Americans were sick. That is about 25% of all of the COVID infections over the past 26 months. Other than January 2022, COVID infections averaged 2.4 million per month.
First quarter GDP fell by 1.4% in 2022.
I would bet that some of the GDP drop was due to the absolutely extraordinary level of illness in the first quarter.
I hadn’t noticed any commentary that agrees with this point. But I am guessing that since we are all feeling that we have turned the corner on COVID, we are deliberately putting it out of our minds. Which may cause us to draw erroneous conclusions about what is happening with the economy and take actions to fix something that may have been driven to some extant by the pandemic, not some other type of weakness in the economy.
Riskviews 