S2E1 Amanda Rector’s ”(Un)precedented: Reflecting on the Early Lessons of the COVID-19 Pandemic” - Maine Policy Matters

Maine Policy Matters—Season 2, Episode 1

Link to Essay: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol30/iss2/1/ 

What’s a state economist to do in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic? When everyone is asking for answers, but they are hard to find?

In this episode of Maine Policy Matters, Amanda Rector, the Maine state economist since 2011, shares her thoughts on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic’s economic impact, and what the future might hold.

Transcript

What’s a state economist to do in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic? When everyone is asking for answers, but they are hard to find?

Amanda Rector, the Maine state economist since 2011, shares her thoughts on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic’s economic impact, and what the future might hold.

[Background music]

This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine.  I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center.

On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. Today, we are going to hear an essay written by Amanda Rector–the Maine state economist–entitled  “Unprecedented: Reflecting on the Early Lessons of the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

In her words (full text of original article):

I remember very clearly the last days I spent in my Augusta office before the COVID-19 pandemic had me working from home. The last in-person meeting I spoke at was awkward as we tried to figure out the social dynamics: do we shake hands? Elbow bump? Wave from a safe distance? I chatted with someone in the parking lot who was hauling a computer monitor and keyboard and box full of paperwork to her car. “Who knows when we’ll be back,” she joked. The white board in my office was covered with notes on the potential economic effects from the pandemic. They were up for so long before I came back that I can still see traces of it that I couldn’t fully erase—a memory of the last days before so many lives changed so much.

I spent the early days of the pandemic drinking from a firehose of information, trying to wrap my brain around the economic impacts of a global pandemic. As an economist, I found I was suddenly a very popular person, even though it felt like I was just repeating the phrase “I don’t know” in every conversation. The only upshot was that no one else knew either. I took advantage of the small-town nature of Maine to start calling folks up, asking how their businesses or sectors were doing, what they saw coming down the pike, and what might be helpful as they navigated this strange new world of PPE (personal protective equipment) and stay-at-home orders. While the plural of anecdote is not data, on-the-ground perspectives do count for something when data aren’t available.

Data are my bread and butter: I use numbers and trends to understand what is happening and then translate that data for people who are trying to make decisions, whether policy, business, or research related. The challenge was that the pandemic broke my data sources. Demographic and economic data are notoriously lagged and most traditional sources wouldn’t start reflecting effects from the pandemic for months. The first source of real data I could get my hands on was vehicle miles traveled from the Maine Department of Transportation. We could use this as a proxy for economic activity because of the nature of the economic disruption—economic activity had slowed because the physical movement of people had slowed.

Even as quickly as the pandemic was breaking traditional data sources, though, there were people and organizations scrambling to put together innovative new data sources. Many of these new sources used bi