Recovery tracker: Workplace visits at May 2020 lows, power generation down

Other indicators too weighed down by surge in Covid-19 cases

The surge in Covid-19 cases has weighed on multiple indicators that were earlier on the upswing.

India added more than 400,000 daily cases on more than one occasion during the week. It has become the country with the highest number of fresh additions in the world. It is now adding more cases every day than the continents of South America and Europe combined, according to tracker Our World in Data.

Workplace visits have dropped 46.3 per cent shows mobility data from search engine Google. It tracks anonymised location data from its users to see how people are moving during the pandemic. Retail and recreation visits are down 58.3 per cent. Even shopping for essentials like groceries and medicines is down 18.7 per cent (see chart 1).

The amount of electricity that India generated is now lower than in 2019. It had shown double-digit growth earlier in the year. It had dropped significantly year-on-year during the national lockdown of 2020. Factories had shut down as had workplaces. Lockdowns have been more localised this time around (see chart 2).

Traffic congestion in major cities like Mumbai and New Delhi are around a fifth of what is usually seen during this time. Mumbai traffic was slightly higher than New Delhi’s, shows data from global location technology firm TomTom International. Mumbai’s cases have also been coming down (see chart 3)

Business Standard also tracks emissions of nitrogen dioxide. It comes from vehicles and industrial activity. Mumbai’s emissions saw a rise for the latest week. It was down 61 per cent in Delhi (see charts 4 and 5).

The Indian Railways’ numbers benefitted from last year’s lockdown. The low base from that period has resulted in higher growth figures for the latest week (see chart 6). All the zones show a higher quantity of freight than the previous year.  All the key goods transported are also higher. They include cement and related products, minerals and ores as well as coal and coke.

Business Standard tracks these indicators as a means of getting a current sense of the economy ahead of the release of official data. Analysts globally have been tracking similar numbers to get a sense of the situation on the ground as different countries went into lockdown to control the pandemic. All data except Google’s numbers are as of Sunday 9th May. Google data is released with a lag. The latest is as of May 5.