How have restaurants fared over the pandemic?

A fascinating dataset from OpenTable, showing how economies recover when the SARS-CoV-2 is controlled properly...and why ours is going to be depressed until we get it together.

This shows the change vs. a week ago (matching days of week) for restaurant reservations in a number of countries before the lockdowns started. Most everybody is running +/- 10% from the year before.

Then it happened...

Italy locked down on March 8th and 9th. UK got serious around 3/18. San Francisco around 3/15, NY 3/21. By March 23, restaurants in the tracked cities were essentially all shut down.

That escalated quickly. You'll also note that much of the effect happened before government mandates, as news of the outbreaks spread.

This continued until mid May, when numbers in Germany started to pick up. Germany's case count at this time was down about 90% from the peak; the US total was only down 25%.

By early June, Germany's restaurants were almost back to normal, Australia was at about 80%. The US was up to about 35% of normal, but the UK was still locked down hard. (At this point, the UK's case rate was about half of the US level, many US states had been reopening for weeks.)

By mid July, the US case rate was 20x higher than in the UK. US restaurant business was still at about 40% of normal, while the UK was up to about 65% of normal.

German and Ireland were actually doing more business than in the previous year. Australia was up to 85%, and Canada has passed 50% recovery.

And here's the latest data.

Germany, Ireland and the UK restaurants are doing more business than this time last year. Australia is a bit behind with the lockdown in Victoria, but still doing relatively well overall. The US restaurant business remains around half of last year's level.

Similar things are happening with bars, movies, hotels, air travel, etc.

Business can't get back to normal until we get the outbreak under control.

One other side note - the data set tracks cities and states. There's a narrative developing that the Northeast is doing well because they're near herd immunity. (They're not.) While the number of immune people makes some difference, check the restaurant stats to see how slowly and carefully NY reopened vs. states that had bigger second waves, it's pretty clear.

Just one snapshot, May 29, before the 2nd wave had really taken off. States and percent of normal business in restaurants: NY 1%, NJ 2%, Arizona 52%, Florida 42%, Texas 45%.