First Quarter GDP

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.

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Volunteer Observers Wanted

The COVID Mitigation Monitoring Project needs your eyes!

Please share what you are seeing at the

COVID OBSERVATION COLLECTOR

Here is an example of what we are learning from the Observations that we have collected.

See more at the COVID Mitigation Monitoring Project website.

Monitoring COVID Mitigation Compliance

Many discussions of COVID-19 mitigation revolve around the requirements and recommendations that are made by the government.

The CDC suggests answering this question:

• To what extent do individuals and organizations practice community mitigation strategies?

We will seek to answer that question via a questionnaire.  Right now, we have piloted that questionnaire twice with about 30 people providing observations.

We have observations from people in the above states, which provide diverse situations regarding their COVID situation. (Here Level refers to the number of new cases per 100k from the past 14 days and Rate refers to the New Infection Rate which is the new infections from the current day as a percentage of the infections for the prior 14 days.)

Pilot Project Findings – not credible amount of data

The above reflects the average compliance over 36 mitigation strategies.  This is a Pilot, so we are not concerning ourselves about numbers of observations but we recognize that these are not sufficient to draw any conclusions about the actual level of compliance.  Of those 36 strategies, the top 10 are:

Pilot Project Findings – not credible amount of data

We welcome additional observers.  We will be continuing the Pilot Project and working on getting funding to turn this into a full scale research project.

To contribute your observations follow this LINK.  We welcome both additional observers for the states above as well as observers from states where we have not yet received any observations.