Coronavirus

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ assessments of their personal financial situation during the current period of economic slowdown and high unemployment rates caused by the coronavirus outbreak. For this analysis, they surveyed 13,200 U.S. adults in August 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

The coronavirus outbreak has driven many commercial and social activities online and for some the internet has become an ever more crucial link to those they love and the things they need. A new Pew Research Center survey conducted in early April finds that roughly half of U.S. adults (53%) say the internet has been essential for them personally during the pandemic and another 34% describe it as “important, but not essential.”

Even with COVID-19 requiring social distancing for the weeks or months to come, the United States still requires an enormous class of workers to keep essential services online. The Department of Homeland Security uses a sweeping definition of such essential industries, which collectively employed anywhere from 49 to 62 million workers prior to the COVID-19 outbreak according to our highest estimates. Many of these essential industries will see continued demand for their products and services, the inverse of other industries that cannot operate during a period of social distancing.

As COVID-19 cases have surged in the United States, young adults face a weakening labor market and an uncertain educational outlook. Between February and June 2020, the share of young adults who are neither enrolled in school nor employed – a measure some refer to as the “disconnection rate” – has more than doubled, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data by Pew Research Center. Most of the increase is related to job loss among young workers.

At the beginning of 2020, the share of Americans ages 16 to 24 who were “disconnected” from work and school mirrored rates from the previous year. But between March and April, the share jumped significantly, from 12% to 20%. By June 2020, 28% of youths were neither in school nor the workplace.

The coronavirus outbreak has pushed millions of Americans, especially young adults, to move in with family members. The share of 18- to 29-year-olds living with their parents has become a majority since U.S. coronavirus cases began spreading early this year, surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression era.

The European Union and the United States have both been deeply affected by the coronavirus outbreak. The two contribute equally to the world economy, each accounting for about 16% of global output. A key difference is that the EU is home to about 100 million more people than the U.S. But Americans have lost significantly more jobs than their EU counterparts during the COVID-19 downturn.

One factor in play is that while countries across the EU deployed significant employment retention schemes, the U.S. focused on stimulus checks and unemployment compensation in lieu of job retention.

About 600,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since the coronavirus outbreak began. But behind that huge figure is a more nuanced one that brings the human toll of the virus into even sharper relief.

In addition to the overall number of deaths from a given cause, researchers can estimate the number of “life years” lost due to it – a statistic that takes life expectancy into account. For example, if a person with a life expectancy of 80 dies at age 50, they are estimated to have lost 30 years of life. Examining this statistic underscores the extent to which the virus has cut Americans’ lives short.

School districts across the United States have had to make many difficult decisions to prepare for the 2020–2021 school year amid the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. However, until now, little information has been gathered directly from teachers and principals about what is happening on the ground, their perceptions of how students are faring, and which students they feel are most at risk of falling behind.

COVID-19 has disrupted all forms of human mobility through the closing of national borders and halting of travel worldwide. Preliminary estimates suggest that the pandemic may have slowed the growth in the stock of international migrants by around two million by mid-2020, 27 percent less than the growth expected since mid-2019, according to a report by the United Nations.

Growth in the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010.  Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 per cent of the world’s population.

In this report, the Guttmacher Institute examines new data collected from cisgender women in the United States on how they feel that the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced their sexual reproductive health. It also examines women’s reports of pandemic-related economic challenges and how these challenges intersect with their sexual and reproductive experiences. Across these analyses,particular attention is given to longstanding social and economic inequities experienced by women based on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or income level.