The Pandemic Misery Index
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Date
2021-03-18
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought with it both human and economic loss. The Pandemic Misery Index, or PMI, is a simple metric that measures the effectiveness of pandemic-related public policies by combining the unemployment rate with the number of deaths per 10,000 people. This policy study calculates the PMI for states and metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs. Two variants of the PMI are also discussed. The first is based on average unemployment rates from the start of the pandemic in March and the cumulative number of deaths per 10,000 up to December 2020. As of the end of 2020, New Jersey and New York had the highest PMIs at 32.4 and 30.7 respectively. Vermont had the lowest PMI at 9.0 and Utah’s 9.3 was second lowest in December. The second variant, the Relative Pandemic Misery Index, or RPMI, captures how an area is faring at a point in time relative to the hardest hit months of the pandemic by tracking an area’s monthly unemployment rate and death rates relative the total range of these two metrics over the course of the pandemic. New York had high initial RPMI values, but its values have since declined. In contrast, North and South Dakota had low initial RPMI values, but their values have risen in recent months
Description
Finance_
Keywords
Pandemic, coronavirus, Covid-19, PMI, pandemic misery index, Finance_