The Economic Impact of the Coronavirus

How COVID-19 has affected the U.S. and global economy, from unemployment, housing, and homelessness to the closure of restaurants and other small businesses.

By The New Yorker

The New Yorker
Asylum Seekers
The Parisians Housing Refugees During the Pandemic
The New Yorker - Annie Hylton
Hundreds in the city have joined an ad-hoc shelter system, opening spare bedrooms and living rooms to migrants and asylum seekers. Aziz and Sima met near the exquisite tiles and towering minarets of a...
2 days ago
The New Yorker
U.S. Politics
Joe Biden Plays Hardball on Social Spending
The New Yorker - With Dorothy Wickenden
The President ran on his commitment to compromise, but his first major initiatives advance progressive policies without support from Republicans. Joe Biden promised to be the country’s Unifier-in-Chief,...
Apr 8
The New Yorker
Randi Weingarten
Randi Weingarten on Opening Schools Safely
The New Yorker - Isaac Chotiner
The head of the American Federation of Teachers discusses why she’s skeptical of new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control. Since 2008, Randi Weingarten has run the American Federation of Teachers,...
Apr 2
The New Yorker
Pandemics
Recovering from the Emotional Challenges of the Pandemic
The New Yorker - Isaac Chotiner
A psychologist considers the possible effects of a global experience of long-term stress. With Americans being vaccinated at a rate of more than two million shots per day, attention has begun to turn life...
Mar 30
The New Yorker
Architecture
A Brief Anatomy of Outdoor Dining
The New Yorker - Adam Gopnik
The outdoor shelters are, in the midst of so much sadness, a shining instance of the sheer bounce of creativity on our city streets. Back in the nineteen-sixties, the Museum of Modern Art held a trailblazing...
Mar 20
The New Yorker
Pandemics
Remembering a City at the Peak of Crisis
The New Yorker - With David Remnick
April 15, 2020, was near the apex of the coronavirus pandemic as it first hit New York City brutally hard. This episode documents twenty-four hours at the epicenter. April 15, 2020, was near the apex the...
Mar 19
The New Yorker
Larry Summers
Larry Summers Versus the Stimulus
The New Yorker - Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Could the passage of a $1.9 trillion coronavirus-relief package mark the end of the neoliberal era? Here is Larry Summers, appearing at a Zoom debate, hosted by Princeton last month, on the Biden Administration’s...
Mar 18
The New Yorker
Taxes
Biden’s Stimulus Plan Contains an Experiment in Universal Basic Income
The New Yorker - Sheelah Kolhatkar
The bill’s child tax credit has the potential to change the way that the United States addresses poverty. On Tuesday, March 9th, Amy Castro Baker stood on her front porch and watched as her two teen-age...
Mar 15
The New Yorker
Pfizer
Why COVID-19 Vaccines Aren’t Yet Available to Everyone
The New Yorker - Sue Halpern
President Biden has promised that all adults will be eligible to receive a vaccine by May. But manufacturing and distributing enough doses will depend on a lot of things going right. About a year ago,...
Mar 13
The New Yorker
The Stimulus Is Only the Start
The New Yorker - Adam Davidson
We need a much bigger, historic reframing of how we think about work and employment and equity. Perhaps we should be grateful for Joseph Tipaldo. He was, by all accounts, an awful man. But it was his almost...
Mar 11
The New Yorker
United States
Life After Vaccination
The New Yorker - Isaac Chotiner
Dr. Ashish K. Jha considers what restrictions should remain in place once a large number of Americans have received protection against COVID-19. The Biden Administration announced this month that every...
Mar 9
The New Yorker
South America
What the Coronavirus Variants Mean for the End of the Pandemic
The New Yorker - Dhruv Khullar
The virus is mutating—but we can still beat it, one vaccination at a time. Last March, during the first wave of the pandemic, Adriana Heguy set out to sequence coronavirus genomes. At the time, New York...
Mar 7
The New Yorker
The Vaccine Resisters
The New Yorker - Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Why do so many people say that they won’t be immunized against COVID-19? Right now, the public health of the United States depends upon giving away something extraordinarily valuable—the COVID-19 vaccines....
Mar 5
The New Yorker
A Year in America’s First COVID Epicenter
The New Yorker - James Ross Gardner
Twelve months after Seattle suffered the first reported coronavirus death in the U.S., city leaders reflect on what has worked—and what remains agonizingly broken. America’s coronavirus nightmare began...
Mar 1
The New Yorker
With a Third Vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson, Are We Finally Winning Against COVID-19?
The New Yorker - Amy Davidson Sorkin
It’s been a year of emotional ups and downs, but for now, at least, even with more variants of the virus, the ups seem to be winning. Optimism is one of the things that the coronavirus pandemic has made...
Feb 28
The New Yorker
The Good, the Bad, and the Embarrassing in America’s COVID-19 Response
The New Yorker - Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Were Americans too unruly, or did elected officials expect too little of them? The pandemic has been both a bad and an embarrassing time to be an American. Bad in an actuarial sense, because per-capita...
Feb 25
The New Yorker
How Restaurants Survive the Long Pandemic Winter
The New Yorker - Nick Paumgarten
Amid shutdowns and snowstorms, small businesses stretch to keep staff safe, diners warm, and inspectors out of their hair. New York City’s first blizzard of the season whipped in on a Wednesday evening...
Feb 22
The New Yorker
The Rural Alaskan Towns Leading the Country in Vaccine Distribution
The New Yorker - Caroline Lester
In Native communities where tribal health organizations are in charge of distributing the vaccine, herd immunity is on the horizon. Reid Magdanz got the call on December 21st. He was sitting at home, his...
Feb 21
The New Yorker
Atul Gawande on Coronavirus-Vaccine Distribution and When Normalcy Might Return
The New Yorker - David Remnick
The New Yorker staff writer assesses President Biden’s effectiveness at fighting the virus, new mutations, and when it might be possible to enter public spaces safely without a mask. The United States...
Feb 19
The New Yorker
A Survival Center Tries to Survive the Pandemic
The New Yorker - Oliver Whang
Bobby Simpson has been distributing food in Kentucky for decades. Now the people who usually help him help others are hurting, too. “Watch to the right,” Bobby Simpson said from the passenger seat as passed...
Feb 16
The New Yorker
The Fight for Fifteen at an Orlando McDonald’s
The New Yorker - Eleni Schirmer
For Cristian Cardona and his co-workers, the pandemic brought new meaning to a nationwide movement to raise the minimum wage. A few days after Mother’s Day in 2019, a McDonald’s in Orlando, Florida, found...
Feb 15
The New Yorker
The Biden White House Is Tossing Obama’s Economics Playbook
The New Yorker - John Cassidy
Joe Biden and Janet Yellen are proving to be far bolder than past Democratic Administrations. If there were any doubt that Joe Biden’s economic proposals represent a big break with the policies of the...
Feb 11
The New Yorker
What’s at Stake in the Fight Over Reopening Schools
The New Yorker - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
From housing to health care, low-income people and others ravaged by debt and inequality are beginning to demand a better life subsidized by public money. As tens of thousands of Americans continue to...
Feb 9
The New Yorker
Can a Country Control the Virus and Host a Grand Slam? Australia Is Trying
The New Yorker - Louisa Thomas
In light of Melbourne’s long stretch of stringent lockdown measures, Australia’s decision to allow more than a thousand people into the country for a tennis tournament has been controversial. For fourteen...
Feb 7
The New Yorker
Andrew Cuomo
The Indoor-Dining Debate Isn’t a Debate At All
The New Yorker - Helen Rosner
On Valentine’s Day, New Yorkers will be allowed to eat inside restaurants again. We shouldn’t. Last Friday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that New York City restaurants would be allowed to resume partial-capacity...
Feb 5
The New Yorker
The Hard Times and Uncertain Future of a Casino Worker in Atlantic City
The New Yorker - Oliver Whang
The hospitality industry has been hit harder by the pandemic than any other part of the economy—and some of those jobs may never come back. Andrea Barbarotta moved to Atlantic City in 1985, just after...
Feb 4
The New Yorker
The Three Biggest Lessons of the Coronavirus Economy
The New Yorker - John Cassidy
Nearly a year into the pandemic, solving the economic crisis means defeating the virus. Since the coronavirus pandemic hit the American economy like a bulldozer, last spring, we’ve learned three important...
Jan 30
The New Yorker
Why Rich Countries Should Subsidize Vaccination Around the World
The New Yorker - Isaac Chotiner
The economists Selva Demiralp and Muhammed A. Yildirim say there is an economic as well as a moral case for getting COVID-19 vaccines into the arms of the world’s people. More than half of all available...
Jan 30
The New Yorker
Biden’s Pandemic Plan Might Just Work
The New Yorker - Dhruv Khullar
The coronavirus is devastating America, and getting worse—but it’s not too late for a concerted effort to save countless lives. It is hard to overstate the scale of the pandemic in America. On many days,...
Jan 27