Showtime: The Price of COVID

Pandemics ain't cheap.
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This essay was initially published in November 2021; in July 2022, it was updated to reflect still-rising price levels.

The Federal Reserve has established an inflation target, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, of 2 percent.

The CPI, or Consumer Price Index[1], increase by more than 6 percent between October 2020 to October 2021.

Price levels have continued to rise, though, and inflation remains at its highest level in decades.

CPI

Updated: July 2022

  1. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures the average monthly change in the price for goods and services paid by urban consumers — roughly 88 percent of the total population. ↩︎