2022 E-Insights Report

Section 2: Impact of COVID-19 on the Economy

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives, pushed health care systems to (or in some cases beyond) capacity and caused a global economic slowdown. As of Dec. 11, 2021, there were 49.7 million COVID-19 cases and more than 794,000 deaths in the United States alone. Prior to the pandemic, the American economy was thriving. However, the pandemic has greatly impacted consumer spending and adversely affected the regional commerce.

In this section, researchers analyzed the impact and recovery of COVID-19 on the Tampa Bay MSA using data such as consumer spending and online searches related to local commerce and unemployment concern. The data sources for this analysis are Affinity Solutions and Google Trends.

Consumer spending tracks the seven-day moving average credit/debit card spending by people living in their respective MSAs relative to January 2020. Researchers calculated the percentage change of daily expenditures over the days with respect to January. They tracked the percentage change over 21 months for 20 MSAs.

They gathered the data for this through the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker. It combines anonymized data from leading private companies – from credit card processors to payroll firms – to provide a real-time picture of indicators such as employment rates, consumer spending, and job postings across counties. The data for consumer spending comes from Affinity Solutions, the world’s leading data-led intelligence platform. It buys data of first-party credit and debit card transactions daily. Information is anonymized for analysis.

In addition to the consumer spending, researchers also analyzed signals from Google Trends. The researchers use Google Trends to analyze the consumer spending behavior to derive the understanding on the impact of COVID-19 on the commercial activity of Tampa Bay MSA. Google Trends also provides rich insights into the unemployment concern in the regions due to the layoffs that followed the spread of COVID-19. To track the local commerce activity, researchers chose the search terms, “events near me,” “movies near me,” “malls near me,” “restaurants near me,” and “concerts near me.” For the unemployment concern, researchers used the search terms “hiring freeze,” “now hiring,” “unemployment benefits,” “how to file for unemployment,” and “job openings.”

Key takeaways for each indicator after the charts.