Deschenaux and Meyers: How COVID Affects the Budget and How We Can Prepare for Future Shocks

 The COVID pandemic has presented us with a string of important medical questions to which we initially had no answers, such as: How contagious is the disease? And which therapies might prevent deaths? We are still uncertain about when a safe and effective vaccine will be widely distributed enough to allow a return to economic and social normality. All this uncertainty has affected and will affect Maryland’s budget.

After we learned that COVID is especially contagious, we took a series of dramatic steps to reduce cases, starting with an unprecedented shutdown of economic activity. This pandemic was guaranteed to hurt  the state’s fiscal position, in part because we had to make unanticipated purchases of medical supplies, but most importantly by reducing revenues...

https://www.marylandmatters.org/2020/10/09/descheneaux-and-meyers-how-covid-affects-the-budget-and-how-we-can-prepare-for-future-shocks/