Pandemic's economic toll estimated at $14 trillion through end of 2023

(TND) — The pandemic's economic toll on our country will reach $14 trillion by the end of this year, according to a team of researchers at the University of Southern California.

They acknowledged that putting a price tag on all the pain, suffering and upheaval caused by COVID-19 is difficult. More than a million Americans lost their lives to the virus, and more than 6 million Americans were hospitalized.

But the economic impacts have also been real and significant.

The USC team looked at data from the first 30 months of the pandemic, up to last summer, and projected the total economic losses over a four-year period.

They say the nation’s gross domestic product would’ve been $117 trillion without the pandemic. Instead, the GDP from 2020 to 2023 is estimated to be $103 trillion.

The sectors that lost the most ground during the first two-and-a-half years of the pandemic were air travel, dining, and health and social services, according to the researchers.

Mandatory closures and avoidance behavior, such as customers staying away from stores and restaurants, had the largest negative impacts on our economy.

Airline travel fell by nearly 60%, indoor dining fell by 65%, and in-store shopping fell by 43% at the height of the pandemic, they said.

The fiscal stimulus, increase in internet commerce, and the flexibility of Americans to keep working many jobs remotely helped offset the losses.

And Americans spent from pent-up demand once businesses were allowed to reopen, helping the recovery process.

But they still say the pandemic took an economic toll incomparable to any in recent memory. The scope of the impact surprised them, said one of the researchers.

“This is twice the size of the Great Recession and 10s of times the size of most disasters that have befallen the U.S. in this 21st century,” said Adam Rose, research professor of economics and public policy at USC.

“It’s just enormous,” he said.

The pandemic is still influencing the economy.

Rose said the rise of telework and online shopping are among the worker and consumer changes that will have the most lasting effects.

“The real concern is being prepared for the next pandemic,” he said. “So, it's going to happen again. It could even be larger. And we need to learn some lessons from this one about how to cope with it.”

Progress on vaccines is important, he said. And he said we will need better risk communication to cut down on public fear and get more buy-in for efforts to slow disease transmission.

“Some would say, and there's some credence to the (belief that the) government overreacted on mandatory closures, which was the major contributing factor to the losses,” Rose said. “And so that needs to be assessed a little more accurately and without all the emotion.”

But he said slow reopening processes also hurt the economy.

“So, even after the government gave an all-clear, you have a lot of people still shying away from brick-and-mortar stores and public assembly sites and things out of fear,” he said.

The government stimulus, which ranked among the largest factors softening the downturn, was more beneficial early in the pandemic than it was in later months, Rose said.

“In the early years, it was really positive,” he said. “But then in the latter-half years, it started having a negative effect because some of the loans had to be paid back. And then you also had a situation where (the) government expenditures (were) crowding out ordinary investment in the economy.”

The research looked at only the pandemic’s standard economic effects.

Their estimate doesn’t account for something like the lost years of work from a person who died from the disease or someone who is suffering from long-COVID.

And they didn’t attempt to calculate the fiscal impacts of mental health troubles or learning loss resulting from the pandemic.