Tracking the Recovery
If there is such a thing...
Due to the ongoing pandemic, many companies have made some of their data available to the public. These resources can help us gauge both the spread of the pandemic and its impact on economic activity.
Some of these sources are more useful and reliable than others, but they are all interesting.
Coronavirus Trackers
This website provides counters and tracks different statistics, including population, health data, and the economy, among others. It has an entire section devoted to tracking the pandemic’s evolution, which is organized by country.
A map and dashboard tracking the evolution of the pandemic, from the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. I’ve found that this is one of the most often cited resources by the media.
Mobility and Traffic
GPS maker TomTom has developed traffic indices for 416 cities across 57 countries on 6 continents. Each of these indices ranks urban congestion worldwide compared to the previous year’s congestion. It’s a great way to gauge how much people are starting to move around within a certain city.
This is a good resource based on anonymized data from users of Apple Maps. It breaks down GPS guidance requests by three modes of transportation: walking, driving, or public transport. You can drill down by country, state, and city and export the data to a CSV file.
Citymapper is a public transit app and mapping service. It integrates data for all urban modes of transport, from walking and cycling to driving, emphasizing public transport. Since it is available for Apple and Android devices, it offers data from a wide variety of users.
Google Community Mobility Report
This resource is very similar to Apple’s but based on Google Maps users. It offers practically the same level of detail and also allows you to download data.
Sometimes the best way to get a sense of activity is by taking an actual peek into cities and towns. You can do that with traffic cameras. There are many sites for this, but the one I find the most comprehensive is WeatherBug.
Flight and Travel
Stockholm-based FlightRadar24 posts daily stats on the volume of total and commercial flights, with 7-day moving averages. They have an awesome app for tracking flights in real-time, which I can’t recommend enough for any aviation nerd like myself. Great resource!
The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) posts daily stats on how many passengers they screen at security checkpoints at airports throughout the country. Its format is not the best, but the data is there, and it’s a terrific view of the state of air passenger traffic.
Kayak is a travel agency and metasearch engine owned and operated by bookings.com, the largest online travel agency globally. It publishes data on the volume of searches and the most popular destinations. It may be a good leading indicator of future travel demand.
Travel Restrictions Map from Kayak
Another resource from kayak.com with a map showing each country's entry restrictions due to the pandemic. This may be useful to consult if you must travel and see how each country is restricting foreign travel.
Restaurants and Retail
OpenTable State of the Restaurant Industry Report
OpenTable shares data on restaurant reservations made through its platform. It gathers data from its community of nearly 6,000 restaurants in the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Germany, the UK, and Ireland.
SafeGraph is an aggregator of foot traffic to six million point-of-interest in the US. Data is organized by categories, brands, and regions and shows comparables to 2019 for context.
Placer.ai is a start-up that provides businesses with location and foot-traffic analysis tools. It shares its vast data in a user-friendly platform that lets you drill down by brand and compare its foot-traffic to Coronavirus trends. Traffic data is can also be broken up by specific regions of the US.
Womply Local Business Research
Womply aggregates data from different sources to help small businesses. They share research reports and data for specific retail sectors or regions in the US.
The popular consumer review site developed the Yelp Economic Average as a benchmark to gauge economic activity in different US regions. Instead of a dashboard, Yelp produces periodic written reports with a lot of data, analysis, and commentary.
Energy Consumption
Power consumption is one of the most transparent and reliable indicators of economic activity. The European Network of Transportation System Operators, or ENTSO-E, represents 43 electricity transmission system operators from 36 counties in Europe. It shares power demand from all its constituent countries (not are all EU members).
The US Energy Information Administration shares data on energy demand on a national and regional level. The data is also segregated by energy source. This serves as a proxy for industrial and economic activity.
Ecommerce
SimilarWeb provides businesses with website traffic data and other tools. They set up a dashboard with data related to the ongoing pandemic, such as keyword searches and traffic to major websites, such as the World Health Organization or the CDC, and commercial sites from different sectors, such as travel or retail.
Klaviyo is a software platform for digital marketing and ecommerce. Here they publish aggregated data for ecommerce sales, not just online traffic. Data can be broken down by retail category or region.
Shiphero is a platform for warehouse management and third-party ecommerce shipment and fulfillment. They set up a simple dashboard with data from its 1,000+ merchants who sell on Shopify or Amazon Marketplace. Together, these merchants represent over $2 billion in annual sales.
Trade and Industrial Activity
Rail traffic is a great indicator of broad economic activity. From the Association of American Railroads, this site provides data on rail traffic in the US, Canada, and Mexico. They publish a sample of weekly, monthly, and annual information on freight rail traffic in interactive charts.
Transborder Freight Data from DOT
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics shares data about freight coming in to and out of the US through various channels. The data can be drilled down to freight category, origin, and destination.
WorldCity Trade Solutions provides a heatmap and various resources on US trade with the rest of the world. On this site, they share trade volume going through ports and airports throughout the country.
Housing
Redfin is a real estate brokerage firm with access to data from multiple listing services and insight from its own real estate agents across the US. It provides information on listing volume, price trends, and other data, broken down by region.
Housing Market Data from Zillow
The popular real estate platform shares data and insight from its vast online real estate database. You can download data on home values, rentals, inventory, and sales.
Advertising
Ezoic shares data on a significant sampling of global sites and uses that data to produce an index to gauge relative online ad rates by day. It’s a decent way to see how digital ad rates have varied over time.
Other
The US Census Bureau created this interactive dashboard based on its small-business surveys. You can drill data down by industry or region. This is a great snapshot of the state of small business in the US.
I will add or remove more resources like these. I’ll try to keep the list relatively short and useful.