How did COVID 19 affect the market and economy

The COVID pandemic started at the end of 2019. It all started in Wuhan, China later it spread into Italy, from Italy it expanded to all of Europe. It spread from Europe to South America and North America because of imports and tourists coming back to their countries.

Since the beginning, there were people that did not care about the virus like with any other virus causing more infections to occur. In Bucaramanga, there was an incident from a woman that arrived from Spain and knew that she had COVID. However, she arrived at Hotel Dan and she did not fulfill the recommendations of using face masks and 7 employees were in isolation because they had contact that had the virus meaning that they could be at risk.

At the beginning of the year countries started to force mandatory quarantine for people that visited Wuhan in the last 14 days. In Colombia , the mandatory quarantine started on March 24th and it was first put to end on July 15th. However for older adults the quarantine was until August 31st. The quarantine started to make everyone stay at home, the only people that could go out were the doctors and people that had emergencies.

This quarantine did not let people that had low resources to keep working since they did not work in offices and their job could not be done online, this would cause that their income started to decrease. Stores such as bars, restaurants, and malls were closed completely, as a result the economy started to decrease since there were a high number of people getting unemployed.There was a comparison made by the DANE, that consisted of the unemployment rate from March 2019 to March 2020. In March 2019, the unemployment rate was 10.8% and it had an increase of 1.8% showing that it is now at 12.6%. According to this unemployment rate, around 6 million people are unemployed in March of 2020. This is the highest amount of unemployment in a comparison from March of 2011 to 2020. Colombia’s quarantines started on March 24, just before the new start of the month in which the growth of the unemployment rate was going to boom. It increased 7.2% from the last month and compared to April of 2019 it grew 9.5%. It is almost 20% of the Colombian population unemployed. Around 10 million people were unemployed at the start of quarantine, these meant that they would not receive any income at all.

Now looking at the United States and the other big countries. When the Covid started you can see the high unemployment increase from 2019 to 2020. There were rates of changes from countries like the US of 6.8%(around 34 million people), in Italy, the unemployment rate was already high of 10% however it still increased up to 12.7%(around 7.5 million people.)

According to graphs from the IMF, all the countries are in a decline economically wise. The advanced economies got a decline of -5.8 to -12.5 in their GDP.. Even though it said that the United States finally stopped their expansion after a decade of increases it finally hit an end because their economy was not able to sustain. This occurred after not having any good measures when quarantine started.

The decrease in GDP causes the unemployment rate to increase. When people stop getting cash, they try to look for jobs, a great way to look for a job is via Linkedin, this is a business that orientates online service for people looking for employees or jobs. A line graph that showed the hiring rate in 5 different countries from the start of 2020 to mid 2020 shows that the lowest points of the graphs are in mid April. In Brasil before the quarantine started the peak there was a peak at around 70% of hiring rate in LinkedIn and in the middle of April it almost decreased by 50%.

In conclusion, we can see that COVID affected the market and many people as well were affected, their economic growth started to decline because of COVID. Not only this but also the income from people not getting their normal income cause problems.. In many countries the unemployment rate started to increase, this represents that also companies are suffering from the situation. In countries like Colombia that doesn’t have that great economy, we can see that the unemployment rate is high of almost 20% of all population did not had a job at the start of the pandemic’s quarantine