Five years after the world stopped and lockdowns began, shocking New York Times data reveals that the COVID-19 panic left permanent scars on America’s economy.
“Remember, that 2020 to 2022 period was a dark economic time, right? It was really, really terrible, and it lasted a long, long time until it came ‘back to normal.’ But the chart can’t even detect those changes any more because COVID broke the chart,” Stu Burguiere of “Stu Does America” comments.
And while many things did go “back to normal,” some things have stayed at COVID levels for five years now.
“Some things changed around the country and never got back to normal. And this is the stuff we really lost because of not only COVID, but the government response to COVID,” Stu explains.
The New York Times charts reveal that used car prices are one of these things that never went back to baseline. The used car market had been reasonable before and at the beginning of COVID, before spiking like crazy up to February 2022. While it has dropped slightly, it’s still far above pre-COVID levels.
“And then this is probably one of the more sad examples of what we lost during COVID,” Stu says. “Third through eighth-graders and their test scores. This is just a way of measuring academic performance, it’s not necessarily just about whether they get lower scores or not, but you see a massive drop-off.”
On average, these students have fallen quite behind in reading and math — but depending on where they go to school, that changes slightly.
“Red states opened early, got their kids back to school. Their decreases are much less punishing to the kids when it comes to academic performance than it is in blue states,” Stu explains.
Even sadder is the chart revealing socialization.
“This was decreasing anyway, before we got to the COVID period, and then we saw a massive drop-off in 2020 by about 25% of the time you’re normally socializing with others. That drops by 25% in 2020 and has stayed low,” Stu says.
“We have now lost a massive percentage of the time that we actually spend with other human beings,” he continues. “That’s bad. Spending all your time online and not spending time with actual people is really, really, bad.”
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