The U.S. continues to recover from the worst of the pandemic, with the nation falling just three percentage points short of "normal" in November, according to Columbia Threadneedle Investment’s “Return to Normal Index.”
“We’ve seen the index continue to improve, and in the first part of November we were around 85%,” Chris Vandergrift, a senior analyst in global research said of the proprietary index devised first as an analytic tool for looking at company investments.
“But the last two weeks kicked up to 87%, primarily coming from travel and retail spending,” Vandergrift continued. “If we look at the number of airline passengers the TSA put through, that ranged 77% to 79% of pre-pandemic levels July through October. In November, it jumped six points to 85%.”
The Return to Normal Index was created by Columbia Threadneedle in an attempt to measure activity relative to pre-pandemic levels. By analyzing activity over time in key categories that reflect the way Americans live their lives outside their homes, the firm expected to be able to plot the nation’s recovery to date—and therefore be able to make some prediction about the future.
The analyst said the most interesting data points in November’s report show which key categories are already back to normal, which are trending in that direction and which seem to have stabilized below pre-pandemic levels.
For example, he said, retail spending, restaurants (for the most part), coffee shops, in-person schooling and event ticketing are essentially are back to normal.
The areas that are more slowly trending upward are taxis and shared rides (still 25% below pre-pandemic levels), air travel (still 16% below), and lodging (still 12% below). The index uses the number of transactions to show activity, not revenue associated with activity.
Two areas that have stabilized well below pre-pandemic levels are gyms (30% to 35% below) and in-person work, which is still 65% below where it was in January 2020.
Not surprisingly, the arrival of Omicron changed the index’s prediction of full recovery, extending it from the first quarter to the second quarter.
“There is some impact to recovery, but not more meaningfully different than Delta,” Vandergrift said. The firm’s healthcare analyst currently views Omicron as more transmissible than Delta, so the number of cases may rise faster than Delta or the initial wave, but the disease it creates appears less severe, he said.