Complete recovery in the U.S. will be very protracted and sporadic given enourmous geographic variability in adopting containment measures. This from the New York Times: “Stay-at-home orders have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, according to an analysis of cellphone location data by The New York Times.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis just released an analysis of COVID-19 rates by level of financial distress in individual counties. For the purposes of this analysis, counties in quintile 1 have the lowest financial distress, quintile 5 the highest. While there are some confounds in terms of access to testing, what is clear is that affluent counties were hit first and hardest in terms of liftoff, and then in terms of deaths.

The Pew Charitable Trust highlights six demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2019. The rise of Generation Z, low illegal immigration, and continued income inequality are some of the trends highlighted. Click here to read the article.