The impact of COVID-19 on the local economy was the topic for last Thursday’s Lebanon Rotary Club meeting.
The meeting was held by via Zoom and included a presentation from Brian Thompson, CEO of Lebanon REDI.
He said the area had seen some slowdowns and layoffs in the later part of 2019, but had expected a comeback in 2020.
The Laclede County numbers started to show the effect of the coronavirus in March.
“Some of the early downturns began in the middle of March, the unemployment rate went up some,” he said. “We don’t have April data, that’s going to start telling the story of what the unemployment impact is.”
Nationwide, 20.2 million jobs were lost between April and May, he said.
He said April job losses were more than double those lost during the 18 months of the Great Recession,” he said. “That’s a huge impact. We’ll know a little bit more what that looks like locally in a couple of weeks when our localized data comes out.”
The numbers showed a huge spike in unemployment claims in March.
“You can see where things got rough as far as the state of Missouri goes, the week ending March 14, you had just under 4,000 claims. Then the week of March 21 it spikes to 42,000 and 104,000 plus the next week,” he said.
He said the increase in claims seemed to slow down after that, declining to 59,000.
Thompson also had numbers from Extension from April 11, showing a 73 percent increase in retail wholesale over the year before.
“That’s why the toilet paper was all out,” Thompson said. “Everybody was going crazy and shopping right before some of the big time major shutdowns were taking place.”
Thompson said many businesses have taken a hit including restaurants, lodging laces, transportation and health and beauty.
He said tourism is a big part of the local economy and businesses related to that have also been hurt.
He said the local area will likely see an impact similar to federal data showing the hotel occupancy rate decreasing from last year and dropping sharply in March. March 15 through the 21st, he said there was a 30.3 percent hotel occupancy rate, which is down 56.4 percent from the prior year.
“That’s devastating for that industry, we’re finally seeing things getting a little better, but not tremendously better,” he said.
Thompson said this affects the city because of the lodging tax it collects to support tourism and marketing.
“You think of Justus Furniture, which is a big supplier to the hotel world, it devastated them,” he said. “Because those hotels are not being occupied, they’re no longer needing certain furniture and other things.”
He highlighted some positive things, including businesses that stayed open, such as Emerson.
