Recovery tracker: More signs of recovery as Covid-19 cases decline

People are stepping out of their homes more as confidence builds with reported number of Covid-19 cases staying below 100,000 on multiple days in the past week.
 
Covid cases slipped below the six-figure mark on June 7 and have generally been showing a down­ward drift for much of the week ending Sunday. There was a corre­sponding improvement in weekly indicators of economic activity. People spent more time out of home than they did since April this year. Using anonymised location data, search engine Google tracks how people are moving during the pandemic. Visits to workplaces have gone up. Travel in general seems to have improved with more people turning up at transit stat­ions like subways, buses and trains. Parks have also seen more visitors (see chart 1). Google data is released with a lag. The latest is as of June 8. All other data is as of Sunday, June 13.

 
There has also been an increase in traffic congestion, which is trac­ked by global location technology firm TomTom International. Traffic went up for the fourth week in a row in both Mumbai and New Delhi.
 
However, both cities still have only around half the traffic that they did during the same time in 2019. New Delhi's traffic recovery is slightly behind that of Mumbai's as of now (see chart 2) relative to 2019. Mumbai also recorded higher emissions of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that comes from indu­strial activity and vehicles. Delhi’s emissions are lower than they were in 2019. They are down around 40 per cent now, compared to 48 per cent in the beginning of May when Covid cases were in excess of 350,000 a day (see charts 3, 4).

 
The Indian Railways continued to show double-digit growth. It carried around 30 per cent more goods than in the same week last year. The earnings from the goods carried was around 41.5 per cent higher (see chart 5). Power demand, too, continued its upward trend as more states eased lockdown restrictions and allowed more commercial activity. Electricity generation was up 5 per cent last week on a sequential basis. It was up by around 11.3 per cent year-on-year compared to the correspo­nding week in 2020, but it was lower by around 5 per cent compared to the corresponding week in 2019 (see chart 6).

 
Business Standard tracks these economic indicators every week. They give a sense of how economic activity changes with the ebb and flow of Covid-19 cases. Official macroeconomic data is often rele­ased with a lag.
 
 Analysts globally have been relying on these indic­ators to get a sense of the economy ahead of official data, as countries across the world faced similar shut­downs to control the pandemic.