Pemo TheodoreUnited States rebounds from prior job losses much faster than Bay Area, California
Once a leading economic powerhouse, the Bay Area now is one of the nation’s weakest regions in recovering the jobs lost when coronavirus-linked business shutdowns began.
The East Bay, the San Francisco-San Mateo region and Santa Clara County are performing so poorly in recovering from the epic employment losses of March and April that each of these local regions, along with the overall Bay Area, is in the bottom 10 of a ranking of 30 large metro areas in the United States, this news organization’s analysis of U.S. Labor Department data shows.
Experts say the lag is not the fault of any underlying economic weakness but rather the impact of the Bay Area’s stringent COVID-19 shutdown. Restrictions on business activity have helped control the coronavirus in an area that saw one of the nation’s first outbreaks, leading to comparatively low rates of infections and deaths. But they have also constrained a normally vigorous economy.
“The Bay Area has been the nation’s most rigorous in implementing the distancing and sheltering guidelines,” said Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a San Jose-based think tank that tracks local economic trends. “This is one of the main reasons why we lost so many non-tech jobs and why they are slow to recover.” Read more via SiliconValley
