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March 28, 2025, Paper: "The COVID business cycle was unique. The recession was by far the deepest and shortest in the U.S. postwar record and the first several quarters of the recovery were remarkably rapid. The cycle saw an unprecedented reallocation of employment and consumption away from in-person services towards goods that can be consumed at home and outdoors. This paper provides a simple empirical model that attributes these and other anomalies in real economic activity to a single unobserved shock. That shock, which turns out to be closely connected to COVID deaths, diminishes in importance over the expansion, consistent with self-protective measures like masking, COVID fatigue, and eventually the availability of the vaccine. The COVID shock and anomalous COVID dynamics largely disappeared by late 2022. It appears that macrodynamics have returned to normal and that the structural shifts wrought by the pandemic have had limited effects on the underlying economic trends of key indicators, despite notable changes like the prevalence of remote work and the large increase in the debt-GDP ratio. Given the magnitude of COVID shock, it is remarkable how limited are its lingering effects on the real macroeconomy."