A quick view of the US economy in three charts

 Chart 1:
The AEI’s weekly Index tracks uses cellphone GPS data from Safegraph.com. tracks how many people visited places of commerce, and it compares the number of visits on a weekly basis to the number of visits in the pre-COVID week ended January 15 (100%).  Remember that January is a slow month after the holidays. The top bold blue Line is Kansas City (80% of January level). The bottom bold red line is San Francisco (45% of January level).



Charts  2 and 3:
Restaurant “seated diners”, only for resturants that take reservations.
OpenTable tracks those who made reservations online or by phone – and then sat down in restaurants, compared to the same weekday in the same week last year. Data exclude cafés, fast-food places, delis, etc. The number of restaurants that used to take reservations is down 26.5% on average over the past 30 days, versus last year, but seated diners are down 41%, probably because of COVID social distancing reducing capacity inside restaurants.


Chart 4:
Kastle Systems provides access systems for 3,600 buildings and 41,000 businesses in 47 states. Kastle’s “10 City Average” of office occupancy is currently at 27.4% of the pre-Pandemic level in early March -- down by 72.6% since early March.  This is a measure of the impact of work-from-home on office occupancy:
      Dallas: 43.3%
    Houston: 36.8%
        Austin: 35.4%

           San Jose: 18.2%
            New York: 17.4%
    San Francisco: 14.7%