OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ) – For nine months, UW Oshkosh’s Center for Customized Research and Services (CCRS) has surveyed Wisconsin businesses to monitor the impact of COVID-19.
The effort, in partnership with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and nine regional development organizations, has tracked and reported changes in employment, income, inventory and productivity.
They hosted a year-end review to summarize and discuss the pandemic’s impact on Wisconsin businesses on Wednesday.
“Significant losses through the course of spring, very little of it is actually related to the governor’s Safer at Home orders and other restrictions on business activity,” said CCRS Interim Director Jeff Sachse. “The other kind of changes that we saw businesses undergo, at least in terms of future expected changes, were more macro or market driven than they were related to specific restrictions…This is simply, largely a response to the market place your prediction of sorts of how long this pandemic will be with us in the market.”
Estimates show that even with vaccines rolling out, the impact of the pandemic will likely last in the markets for another 18-24 months.
The report that the Safer at Home orders weren’t heavily tied to significant losses doesn’t mean that they didn’t cause issues for businesses across the state – especially smaller businesses with little or no liquidity or capital filed away.
“The Safer at Home order did have a significant impact both in terms of current income as well as employment losses, and again, those are very well documented and tracked the survey,” Sachse said. “We’re continuing to see significant continued concerns and continued forecasted losses by those businesses that depend on large gatherings of people.”
Through survey responses, or lack thereof, along with subsequent follow-up calls, Sachse says they confirmed at least 80 businesses were forced to close this year.
So how does the state economy recover? NEW North President and CEO Barb LaMue says it’ll have to do with the ‘Big Three C’s’: Business access to customers, capital and liquidity, and comfortability.
“Buying habits have changed. So the question will be: Once we return back to whatever the new normal looks like, will people go back to the shopping habits or eating out in restaurants as they had before?” LaMue said. “Now it’s the general public understanding the time mean the vaccines being deployed and people feeling the ability and the willingness to be able to go back out and spur the economy.”
But again, that likely won’t happen until people are comfortable and feel completely safe in returning to businesses as they did in the past.
The survey shows that the economy had been ticking back up this fall, but appeared to plateau and even start trending in the wrong direction when it came to things like employment in November.
“We’re having a bit of a ceiling until we can get rid of the community spread so we can’t really expect the economic activity to start to approach normal levels until after the vaccine distribution begins to impact the community spread [significantly],” said UW-Oshkosh Economics Department Chair Chad Cotti. “We’re gonna be able to get the economy moving up really close to stop any stall that we’re hitting, we’re gonna have to try to get to the general population distribution…The general expectation/hope is that we’ll be looking at something like 40 to 45 million people nationally will begin the vaccination process by the end of January.”
Cotti, who Sachse referred to as the survey’s unofficial vaccine tracker, says the lion’s share of economic recovery and resurgence require a shift in the current health status of the state and the country. That means approximately 40 to 50-percent of people would likely have to be immunized before we see a return.
“Some of those fundamental barriers in consumer behavior that are holding back should start to come apart and make a big difference in allowing us to start to gravitate more towards a normal level of economic activity,” Cotti said.
Full survey numbers for December and the year’s review will be released in early January.
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