I have recently started working on a new project and it’s keeping me pretty busy. This newsletter might come in a little less frequently for a while. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions around data.
Covid-19 forced analysts and forecasters to update their playbook and include brand new variables into their models. Suddenly, Covid contaminations became relevant to forecasting stock and commodity prices. And many sectors’ performances became correlated to one mega-trend: the pandemic. One result was the quest for new datasets that could shed light on the virus’ reach.
The same process is once again under way with the epidemic in retreat in much of the West (though, unfortunately, not in the rest of the world). In this newsletter, I highlight several of the data sources that could help track the return to 'normal life’, with a focus on those relevant to the energy and financial communities. This was inspired by the Economist's normalcy index and my own research into this issue.
With the exception of Google Mobility and a few other datasets, at the time of writing high-frequency data are only available for developed countries (mostly Europe and North America), which means they provide a partial view of what’s happening in the world. In addition, the trajectory of one industry as we start to come out of the pandemic might be very different to another. For example, most governments have been loath to reopen borders, with knock-on implications for air travel. But road transport in many countries is already back to pre-Covid levels.
Changes in behaviour linked to the pandemic may continue long after it has ended. Cinema attendance has picked up slowly in the countries that have reopened them. Does this reflect continued reluctance to mix with strangers or rather increased digital consumption via platforms such as Netflix and Disney+? Probably a bit of both, but it will be a show worth watching over the coming months.
Covid-19 helped foster the development of many new datasets. As the epidemic starts to reverse in the West, we will begin to see whether organisations’ commitment to open data remains. In this area, at least, it would be a shame if things returned to normal.
Cinema attendance. Box Office Mojo publishes up-to-date figures on movie theatre ticket sales in the US. I have scraped the weekly sales data, which is available from January 1977 until the first week of July 2021. Now that half of the American population is vaccinated, ticket sales are on the way up. However, during the few days around the key Fourth of July holiday, they remained around 60% below the levels registered in the first week of July 2019. This shows that Americans remain hesitant about being in close proximity to strangers. The chart above presents total US movie ticket sales in the first week of July during the years 2014-2021, together with the top grossing movie in that week (just for fun 😎).
Sports crowds. The website baseball-reference.com compiles detailed statistics about the US National and American baseball leagues, including stadium crowds for each game. The data can also be scraped. Stadiums stayed empty during the whole pandemic, but spectators were allowed from April. Crowds have risen sharply in recent months. In the first week of July, more than 4 million Americans watched a live game of baseball, down just 17% from the same week in 2019. Similar datasets about American football, US hockey, Japanese baseball and Australian football exist. If you know any for Europe, I’d like to hear from you.
Air traffic. As highlighted in previous editions of this newsletter, organisations such as Eurocontrol and the US Department for Transport publish daily data on flights and passenger numbers. OpenSky provides another open source resource, but it is updated infrequently. There are other, paid-for sources such as the International Civid Aviation Organisation (ICAO), OAG and Flight Radar. Aviation activity remains way down internationally due to the continue closure of many international borders, though there are some bright spots such as China and the US, which both have large domestic markets that are nearly back to pre-Covid levels. European traffic has also risen sharply since the start of June, helped by summer holidays and the European Union’s digital Covid certificate.
Road transport. There are many data sources on road traffic, but few comprehensive ones due to the difficulty of measuring it. There is data available for New York, California and some European cities. Here, I chose to highlight traffic data for France from the Centre d'études et d'expertise sur les risques, l'environnement, la mobilité et l’aménagement (Cerema), because it is one of the few country-wide measures I know. Road traffic in the country has risen seasonally in recent weeks, contributing to higher fuel demand.