As of writing in July 2021 global Covid-19 deaths are over 4 million out of a global population of 7.8 billion. We will here focus on the Economic aspects but before we do I just want to observe that this is an immense and tragic loss of life.

The first case of Covid-19 was detected in Wuhan, China during December 2019 and the virus spread rapidly around the world. Countries worldwide experienced their first wave of infections in the first half of 2020 and began imposing lockdowns and mandating the use of masks and social distancing in an attempt to save lives and slow the spread of the virus. Hospitals in Italy were among the first filled to overflowing, with hospitals in many other countries soon finding themselves similarly overwhelmed. The combination of people voluntarily reducing their interactions with others together with government mandated lockdowns brought many parts of the economy to a halt. Restaurants were closed, concerts cancelled, and even elective surgery was put on hold. The result threatened to be a massive loss of income for many people. In response governments stepped in with immense fiscal transfers, paying out large amounts of money in an attempt to keep firms from going bankrupt, keep people from being kicked out of homes due to being unable to pay their rent or mortgage, and simply to make sure that everyone could afford food to eat.

As we shall see both the sheer depth of the recession and the size of the government response were unprecedented. The Covid-19 Pandemic raises many interesting questions and here we will discuss a variety of Economic issues. The focus will be on a combination of what happened, and of trying to understand why it happened and the implications of this.

In this series of posts

• We will look empirically at what happened.
• We will try to understand the economic implications using theory.
• How should we think about the resulting recession?
• What are the economic impacts of lockdowns? How many lives do they save?
• What kind of fiscal and monetary actions were taken? What were their likely effects?
• Plus a bit of fun contemplating challenging moral and ethical questions.

The following link takes you to the first about the Economics of Pandemics as it stood Pre-Pandemic.

Part 1: Pre-Pandemic

If you want to skip directly to the other posts:
Part 2: The Recession Itself
Part 3: Fiscal and Monetary
Part 4: Lockdowns &c.
Part 5: Post-Pandemic
Extra: References and Resources