Graphic detail | Back to the future

Our normalcy index shows life is halfway back to pre-covid norms

Activity tightly regulated by governments has been disrupted more than has behaviour reflecting individuals’ choices

Keep track of which countries are returning to pre-pandemic life with our interactive normalcy tracker

IN 1920 WARREN HARDING won America’s presidency promising a “return to normalcy”, following the first world war and the flu pandemic in 1918-20. A century on, his goal sounds more appealing than ever. It also looks frustratingly hard to achieve.

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In theory, vaccines should end the covid-19 pandemic. Already, one-third of people aged 12 and over have at least one shot. Yet many places are sliding backwards. Australia, Bangladesh and Thailand have all imposed new restrictions. Even Chile, where 77% of over-12s have a vaccine dose, locked down its capital last month.

Such cases do not cast doubt on vaccines’ effectiveness. In countries like Israel, where most adults have two jabs from Pfizer, life now goes on much as it did in 2019. But in other places, even with the end in sight, normalcy remains a long way off. And differences in vaccination rates do not fully explain why some countries enjoy more of it than others.

Covid-19 has changed life in too many ways to count. Yet any effort to assess how much its impact has receded requires a measure of what normalcy is. We have thus devised a normalcy index, tracking three types of activity. The first is travel, split between roads, flights and public transport. Next comes leisure time, divided among hours spent outside of homes, cinema revenues and attendance at sporting events. The last is commercial activity, measured by footfall in shops and offices.

For each variable, we obtained daily or weekly data for 50 countries, which account for 76% of the world’s population and 90% of its GDP. We combine them by measuring the change in each factor from its pre-covid level; averaging the changes in each category; and then averaging the grouped results together. Our global figure weights each country by its population.

We calculate the index relative to a pre-covid norm of 100. When the pandemic was declared in March 2020, China had already locked down, bringing the index down to 80. As the disease spread, the index reached a low of 35. Since last July it has oscillated around 60. It now sits at 66, implying that only half of the disruption caused by covid-19 has been reversed.

Most Western countries are close to this average. America is at 73, the EU 71, Australia 70 and Britain 62. Elsewhere, the range is wider. Both Hong Kong and New Zealand, the leaders at 96 and 88, enjoy nearly full normalcy. In contrast, since April Malaysia’s value has fallen from 55 to 27.

Of the eight activities in the index, three were subject to legal orders that ground them to a halt last March: cinemas, sporting events and flights. All three remain 70-85% below the pre-covid baseline today.

Although many cinemas are now open, studios have begun selling content directly to streaming services (see International). Save for a film-going boom in China during New Year festivities in February—when week-on-week revenues rose by 3,600%—the industry has languished between 20% and 40% of its takings from 2019.

The picture for sport and air travel is a bit rosier. At sporting events, capacity limits have kept crowds at around 20% of their pre-covid baseline. Similarly, there are just 30% as many planes in the sky today as in 2019, owing largely to travel bans and quarantine rules. However, America is an encouraging exception. With robust demand for domestic flights and mass vaccination making attendance limits unnecessary, air travel and baseball stadiums there are at 70% and 90% of their levels from 2019.

Although many governments have required people to stay at home, such rules are hard to enforce. Last April, even though half of the world’s population was subject to such orders, the global average of time spent outside homes fell by only 15%. Compliance rates appear similarly low today: around 14% of people are not allowed to venture out, yet time not at home is just 5% below the baseline of 2019.

The final variables in our index depend mostly on choices by individuals or firms. All have largely recovered, suggesting that people are clawing back as much normalcy as governments will allow. Public transport, which cities generally kept in service, is now up to 80% of its pre-covid level. Driving is at 73%; visits to retail stores are at 91%; and attendance at offices is at 80%. Because many office employees can work remotely, the shortfall in this category probably reflects telecommuting more than unemployment.

The country-level values of our index vary widely, from 16 in Peru in April 2020 to 97 in Vietnam the previous month. A few patterns explain most of the differences, both between countries and over time.

Logically, places facing the worst outbreaks tend to be the least normal. Holding other factors constant, a one-standard-deviation increase in a country’s official covid-19 deaths during the preceding month reduces normalcy by four points. Similarly, tightening lockdown rules by a standard deviation lowers normalcy by five points.

However, it takes time for behaviour to reflect the true spread of covid-19. Normalcy tracks official death tolls from the previous month—which could reflect infections from 60 days ago—much more closely than current case counts. It is also linked only weakly to indirect measures of uncounted cases, such as the share of tests that are positive or changes in deaths from any cause. And although vaccines increase normalcy, they do so only once they have had enough time to reduce deaths. Life remains abnormal in most countries where covid-19 outbreaks took off before enough people could obtain full protection.

Normalcy is also influenced by factors unrelated to the pandemic. In general, Asian countries have been less normal than you would expect. Counterintuitively, behaviour has changed more in places with robust civil liberties than in otherwise similar but less free countries. This would make sense if people in such places are unusually likely to trust their leaders, or if they feel more invested in fellow citizens’ well-being. And richer countries, where lots of people can work from home, are more abnormal than poorer ones.

Our normalcy index does not track economic recovery closely. Some behaviour, such as air travel, is likely to recover eventually. Other variables, like cinema-going or working from home, could signal an enduring change. We will update our index online every week to keep track of the world’s path towards normalcy.

Our interactive normalcy index tracks which countries are returning to pre-pandemic life. To keep up with the rest of our coverage of the pandemic, visit our coronavirus hub. Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter.

Sources: afltables.com; baseball-freak.com; baseball-reference.com; Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; Box Office Mojo; Google; hockey-reference.com; JHU CSSE; Our World In Data; TomTom; pro-football-reference.com; UN ICAO; Transfermarkt; ultimatealeague.com; Wind; The Economist

This article appeared in the Graphic detail section of the print edition under the headline "Back to the future"

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