Ready for Some Good News?

When the Design-Build Institute of America held a webinar last week to assess prospects for economic growth in the post-COVID-19 era, a market-intelligence expert for Olathe-based Pioneer IQ delivered a message of hope. The economy, said Pioneer’s Keith Prather, will get back to normal before long.

Prather used data from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, considered a go-to source for projecting state-by-state spread of COVID and forecasting peak periods. From it, he concluded that parts of the country could emerge from lockdown status before mid-May. His forecast is predicated on the idea that once Americans’ worries over the risk of dying from the coronavirus dissipates due to treatment options, society can return to normal.

“That creates additional fear,” he said. “We’ve still probably got at least two more weeks before we can call it a crisis peak.”

The Web site Construction Drive offered a deeper look at Prather’s Fear and Recovery Curve model  here.