TAMPA, Fla. — While certain industries and businesses are being hit hard right now because of the coronavirus pandemic, Florida isn't considered one of the "hardest hit" states economically.
That's according to Dr. Abby Blanco, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Tampa. She thinks Florida's economy will eventually bounce back post-pandemic.
"I do, I think the economy will eventually completely recover," Blanco said.
The question is how quickly that will happen, and she says it's impossible to give an exact timeline on when we will see a full recovery.
"It’s going to take a while, and some industries will have long and variable effects from this virus and the response to it," Blanco said. "The real question is how long will businesses be restricted in operating their business."
Blanco said the duration of time businesses are closed or reduced is "absolutely going to have an impact" on how quickly the local economy can recover.
Blanco says many economists were "surprised" by the "magnitude of unemployment numbers overall" though, as social distancing practices and regulations meant many businesses were forced to close.
"We can certainly see in Florida that has seen a dramatic increase in unemployment claims, particularly in the last few weeks," she said. "In the past three weeks... we’ve seen about 472,000 unemployment claims for the state of Florida."
Blanco went on to say she expects that number to increase as more people who lost their jobs file for unemployment.
Some of the industries hit particularly hard are the restaurant industry and tourism industry.
Peter Veytia is the COO of Red Mesa Restaurant Group here in Tampa Bay.
He says they’ve had to adapt to take-out and delivery only at all of their locations, and while the support from the community has been amazing, it’s been a tough time to run restaurants.
He says it all started when they had to start operating at 50% capacity.
"I remember when the Friday when they made the announcement for Florida, we had done an early morning schedule based off that we needed half of many servers, that was the first round of cuts," he said.
From there, the rules changed to no dine-in at all, and he says they had to say goodbye to even more employees.
"I’ve been doing this 16 years now and that was the hardest day professionally, just gut-wrenching," he said.
Among their new initiatives while they can only do take-out and delivery is their "help our heroes" fund, which they say provides meals for those on the front lines fighting COVID-19: https://donorbox.org/help-our-heroes
According to a report released by PricewaterhouseCoopers this week, just 22 percent of finance leaders thought their business would be "back to business as usual" within a month once the COVID-19 outbreak is over. That same report said more than a quarter of finance leaders surveyed expected their company to have layoffs in the next month.
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