30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything in March 2020 (Published 2025)
By Aatish Bhatia and Irineo Cabreros
Covid-19 broke the charts.
Decades from now, the pandemic will be visible in the historical data of nearly anything measurable today: an unmistakable spike, dip or jolt that officially began for Americans five years ago this week.
Here’s an incomplete collection of charts that capture that break — across the economy, health care, education, work, family life and more.
Source: Department of Labor
New applications for unemployment benefits, seasonally adjusted.
Three million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the first week, then six million the next, one of the earliest shockwaves to ripple through the economy.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Seasonally adjusted. Excludes farm workers, private household employees, active military and nonprofit organization employees.
Those who still had a job often stayed put. Only later did tens of millions of people quit their jobs for better ones, in the “great resignation.”
Grocery sales are seasonally adjusted. Sales are in 2024 dollars.
Overnight, Americans started stockpiling groceries and stopped ordering from restaurants. (The two have traded places since.)
Source: Energy Information Administration
Daily price of crude oil.
Cars stayed off the roads. Demand for oil cratered. On one day in April, the value of oil fell below $0, a sign of a world turned upside down.
Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Monthly passenger miles on domestic flights and monthly vehicle miles on U.S. highways.
Americans drove less and gave up flying almost completely. It took years for flying to return to prepandemic levels.
At home, our lives changed, but not necessarily for the better.
The pandemic gave many people more time at home and a chance to rethink their relationship to work.
But it also left them more alone, detached and disconnected — changes that have lingered.
Seasonally adjusted and adjusted for changes in alcohol prices using the alcohol consumer price index.
Americans hunkered down and bought a lot of alcohol — a billion dollars more.
Source: American Time Use Survey analysis by Patrick Sharkey, Princeton University
Change in daily time spent at home relative to 2003, when people spent about 16.5 hours at home.
We started spending an extra hour and a half at home each day, on average. At first it was out of necessity, but later, perhaps, out of habit…
Source: American Time Use Survey
Average daily time spent socializing with others.
… but we weren’t hosting more dinner parties. We were just more alone.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Brookings Institution
One thing the revolution in remote and hybrid work enabled: Mothers of the youngest children flooded into the work force, adding to a record number of American women with paying jobs.
Monthly applications to start a new business, seasonally adjusted.
And more people chose to work for themselves, submitting far more business applications than before the pandemic.
For a while, things were weird.
For many, the start of the pandemic was like going through the looking glass. We had to learn to live a little differently — to do things for ourselves, and sometimes just to fill the time.
It was a time of contradictions, and of trends that seemed to signal bigger and more permanent changes than actually happened.
We chopped off our own locks…
… and brought home new friends.
Source: Nasdaq, via Google Finance
Businesses that catered to Americans’ new lives at home soared in value, then fell back to earth.
We shopped online more often …
Source: American Time Use Survey
Change relative to 2003, when people spent about 2.5 hours watching TV, on average.
… and watched more TV.
Source: National Park Service
People flocked to the Great Smoky Mountains, within driving distance for many Americans. Visits to the remote Grand Canyon fell off.
Marriage planning became harder. (But couples caught up.)
Source: Real-Time Crime Index
12-month rolling average of monthly murders and thefts across 351 U.S. cities.
Even crime found strange new patterns. Murder surged, but with more people at home, thefts dipped before rising again. Crime has since subsided, though its memory hasn’t.
We glimpsed a world that could be.
The scale of our response to Covid had many big — if temporary — effects on society. In our relative stillness, we polluted less and spread fewer viruses.
We gave a lot of money to people, especially to children.
And then things went back to normal.
Source: Global Carbon Project
Absolute change from previous year’s emissions. Includes emissions due to fossil fuel consumption and cement production.
Annual global carbon dioxide emissions had the largest fall on record. But they bounced back the next year, resuming their steady climb.
Four-week rolling average of positivity rates from approximately 300 clinical laboratories across the U.S.
With some help from masks, social distancing and fewer crowded gatherings, we beat the flu — but just for a season.
Real disposable income per capita. Inflation-adjusted to 2017 dollars.
Stimulus checks put thousands of dollars in Americans’ pockets… for a while.
Inflation adjusted to 2023 dollars.
Spending on children surged: in the form of tax breaks, and subsidies for health care, food and education. But that, too, didn’t last.
Source: U.S. Department of the Treasury
The scale of spending by the government most likely spared Americans from even more suffering — it also caused the national debt to soar.
We left a world we might not get back to.
Many things that we took for granted never returned to their former levels, with no guarantee they ever will. The pandemic took a hammer to society and left us struggling to climb back from shutdowns, from fear and from illness.
It can be easy, in the bustle of our daily lives, to forget — or look away from — how huge the disruption was half a decade ago.
The numbers will be there to remind us.
Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Passengers are counted each time they board a public transit vehicle.
The new geography of work — along with, perhaps, new discomfort with crowded spaces and fears about crime — has changed Americans’ relationship to public transportation…
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Percent change in prices based on consumer price index of used cars and trucks.
… at the same time that supply-chain troubles and demand for the open road has left used cars 30 percent more expensive than prepandemic…
… at the same time that many people wanted to move, with fewer houses available to buy, inflaming the housing crisis.
The national measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rate has steadily declined, driven down by missed doctors’ appointments and growing mistrust in science and vaccines.
Source: The Educational Opportunity Project, Stanford; and the Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard
Changes relative to test scores in 2019.
Students fell behind by around half a year of learning that they may never fully recover.
Here, adults refer to people older than 16.
The number of people reporting a disability soared. Many Americans struggled with long Covid and reported cognitive issues like “brain fog.”
Ultimately, Covid’s biggest impact has been one of immense loss.
Read more of our past Covid reporting
Official statistics have revealed how severely coronavirus has hurt the job market. But it may take several months before we know whether this economic disaster will resemble a storm or a long winter.
By Quoctrung Bui and Justin Wolfers
The Great Resignation was in fact a moment many people traded up for a better-paying gig.
Oranges and frozen foods are being snapped up. Shelves have fewer choices. And customers are steering their carts in surprising new directions.
We’re in a deflationary moment that surpasses anything seen in most people’s lifetimes.
While airports in major cities are still struggling, some smaller airports that are vacation destinations are busier than before the pandemic.
By Quoctrung Bui and Sarah Kliff
Sales of wine, beer and spirits are up across the board, but “consumers are trading up and spending more,” one analyst said.
A recent study shows Americans are spending notably more time at home, a trend that started long before the pandemic.
By Ronda Kaysen and Alicia Parlapiano
The pandemic shrank many social circles to a skeleton crew. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
The share of women working has reached a record high, with the biggest increases among mothers of children under 5.
By Claire Cain Miller
A record surge in new businesses has helped drive job growth, and could have longer-term benefits.
By Ben Casselman and Sydney Ember
Shelters across the United States are reporting a rise in foster applications as people seek out a friend to ride out the coronavirus crisis with.
By Sandra E. Garcia
Peloton, Zoom and others make way for the shares of “reopening” companies.
By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jason Karaian, Sarah Kessler, Stephen Gandel, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni
Online shopping surged after virus-related shutdowns. But even within the areas of rapid growth, the recent gains have not been spread evenly, new data shows.
We’ve tried all sorts of things to stop us from staring at our devices. Digital detoxes. Abstinence. Now? Bring on the Zoom cocktail hour.
Now is the time to start looking ahead, to spring and summer excursions in the great outdoors.
If the predictions pan out, there will be some 2.5 million weddings in 2022 — the most since 1984 — and yet it’s never been more difficult to plan one. Here’s what couples should expect.
A huge drop in 2023 has been followed by an even greater improvement so far this year.
By Emily Badger and Ben Blatt
An “unprecedented” fall in fossil fuel use, driven by the Covid-19 crisis, is likely to lead to a nearly 8 percent drop, according to new research.
The latest flu season, which normally would have run until next month, essentially never happened.
It is the largest government relief effort in recorded history, and two years after Covid-19 crisis began, money is still flowing to communities. Here’s where it went and how it was spent.
By Alicia Parlapiano, Deborah B. Solomon, Madeleine Ngo and Stacy Cowley
As programs expire, such federal spending is returning to prior levels: $1 for every $6 spent on older adults.
By Claire Cain Miller
Long a focus of conservatives, the level of public borrowing is starting to concern left-leaning economists. Proposed remedies still differ radically.
Public transit ridership fell sharply and still hasn’t recovered.
A shortage of computer chips is keeping automakers from producing enough cars to meet rising demand. Used cars are scarce, too.
By Neal E. Boudette
An increasingly national problem has consequences for the quality of American family life, the economy and the future of housing politics.
By Emily Badger and Eve Washington
The declines began with the pandemic, well before routine vaccines became part of the national political conversation.
The first detailed nationwide data on schools’ recovery shows that achievement gaps have widened, with the poorest students the furthest behind.
By Claire Cain Miller, Sarah Mervosh and Francesca Paris
Adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s are driving the trend. Researchers point to long Covid as a major cause.
As the U.S. reached a grim milestone in the outbreak, The New York Times gathered names of the dead and memories of their lives from obituaries across the country.
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