Google canopy campus planned for a Mountain View site near the search giant’s current Googleplex headquarters, concept. The coronavirus might imperil California’s record-setting economic boom, which faces the forbidding prospect of job losses this year, although the Bay Area and its vigorous tech sector are poised to withstand employment cuts, according to experts with a closely watched economic forecast.
The coronavirus might imperil California’s record-setting economic boom, which faces the forbidding prospect of job losses this year, although the Bay Area and its vigorous tech sector are poised to withstand employment cuts, according to experts with a closely watched economic forecast released Thursday.
“We think that the risk that we will have job losses in California and the United States has gone up significantly,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, which unveiled its quarterly assessment of the economy on Thursday. “We have had a collapse of oil prices and a collapse of stock prices.”
The coronavirus pandemic has unleashed a widening wave of economic woes.
Among the impacts: The coronavirus effects have eviscerated shipping through West Coast ports such as the Port of Oakland and the cargo hubs in Los Angeles and Long Beach.
“The ports have pretty much ground to a halt on the West Coast,” Nickelsburg said in the interview with this news organization. “The number of ships leaving China has dropped dramatically. Even when that starts again, it takes a month for a ship to get across the Pacific. The slowdown in the ports could last at least a couple of months.”
However, the economic and employment effects have gone well beyond the shipping of cargo.
The coronavirus woes have prompted airlines to chop both domestic and international flights, forced professional sports leagues to drastically alter their operations, including suspension of NBA games and plans for pro hockey and college basketball teams to play in deserted arenas, shattered the cruise line industry, hobbled tourism, and crimped hotels.
“The interruption of trade will impact transportation and warehousing, and retail and wholesale trade,” Nickelsburg wrote in his part of the quarterly Anderson Forecast. “The interruption of travel will impact international tourism.”
However, the fallout from the virus will also intensify the demand for health care services and personal care products and services, which could heighten hiring in those sectors, the forecast stated.
“The Bay Area is not immune to this, but because Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are centers of Internet technology, this may be a region that is able to better weather this storm,” Nickelsburg said in an interview with this news organization.
Why? Silicon Valley has invented, commercialized, and distributed an array of products and services that enable more people to curb their exposure to diseases that would be more readily transmitted in mass gatherings.
“There will be a demand for technologies that allow people to work from home or away from the office,” Nickelsburg said in the interview. “The Bay Area has some insulation because of the need for technologies to support distributed workforces.”
