Associated Press
Month after dismal month, Americans have been inundated by an ever-rising tide of devastating numbers. Hundreds of thousands of deaths. Tens of million unemployed.
Through Dec. 14, five in every 100 Americans — 16,716,777 — had been infected by COVID-19. Of those, 303,773 died due to the disease.
Those numbers testify to a historic tragedy. But they don’t fully capture the multitude of ways, large and small, that the virus has upended and reconfigured everyday life in the U.S.
For that, there are a host of other numbers. Some may be less familiar than others, yet all are just as telling in calculating the pandemic’s sweeping impact:
— Miles that Americans did not drive because they were unemployed, working or studying from home and traveling less: 35.3 billion (through August)
— School lunches and breakfasts that went unserved in March and April after schools were closed: 400 million
— Number of people participating in meetings on Zoom each day last December: 10 million
— Number of people participating daily in Zoom meetings by the end of March: 300 million
— Employment rate of low-wage workers as the year nears its end, compared to January: down 20.3 percent
— Employment rate of high-wage workers compared to January: up 0.2 percent
— Share of small businesses that are still closed even as the U.S. economy has reopened: 28.8 percent
— Drop in the number of passengers traveling on U.S. domestic flights this spring: 272.01 million, a decline of 76 percent (March to July, compared to the same period in 2019).
— Dollars the international airline industry has lost this year: $118.5 billion
— Passengers screened by Transportation Security Administration agents at U.S. airports on April 14 last year: 2.21 million
— Passengers screened by the TSA on April 14 this year: 87,534
— Number of TSA screening agents who have tested positive for COVID: 3,575
— Number of TSA agents at New York’s John F. Kennedy International who have tested positive: 152
— Number of people who went to a New York Broadway show during the first week of March: 253,453
— Number of people who have been to a Broadway show since mid-March: 0
— Number of jobs lost at New York City restaurants and bars between February and April: 233,751
— Number of jobs regained at New York City restaurants and bars from April through September: 89,559
— People who applied for a job at Amazon.com in a single week, after the online retailer announced a hiring fair to keep up with skyrocketing orders: 384,000
— Payments to Americans by the Internal Revenue Service to help ease the pandemic’s economic fallout: 153.1 million checks and direct deposits through August, totaling $269.3 billion
— Americans’ spending on restaurants and hotels, compared to January: down 36.6 percent
— Americans’ spending on transportation, compared to January: down 50.9 percent
— Americans’ spending on entertainment and recreation, compared to January: down 64.3 percent
— Americans’ spending on groceries, compared to January: down 2.7 percent
— Total sales of alcoholic beverages during the pandemic: $62.5 billion, up 21.8 percent
— Online sales of alcohol in September compared to a year ago: up 256 percent
— Sales of tequila for home consumption in September and October, compared to a year ago: up 56 percent
— Champagne: up 71 percent
— Ready-to-drink cocktails: up 131 percent
— Production increase in bottles of Purell hand sanitizer this year: up 300 percent
— Number of Purell single-pump “doses” contained in bottles shipped to U.S. hospitals this year: 54 billion
— Dentists who closed their offices entirely, or to all but emergency patients, in April: 97.1 percent
— Dentists whose offices have reopened, but with fewer patients than usual: 65.6 percent
— Dentists who say they are seeing more patients who grind their teeth, usually an indicator of stress: 59.4 percent
— Games played during Major League Baseball’s regular season last year: 2,430
— Fans who attended those games: 68,494,752
— Games played during MLB’s shortened regular season this year: 898
— Fans who attended those games: 0
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Republished with permission from The Associated Press.
