Every week paints a new picture of how the economy is reacting to the COVID crisis. It's amazing to see all the data roll in and talk about unemployment applications going up. Or credit card spending is going down. Or x amount of dollars in federal relief funds are going out. Or all the LinkedIn newsfeed messages from your nextwork hoping to take you in and connect you to someone as a recently laid off person.

It's hard to parse through all of this, but as Axios put it:

The bottom line: The economy is undeniably in a recession, though official data is slow to confirm that. The Q1 contraction shows the beginning of the damage.

Here are some things that stood out to me: some charts, sympathy cards, and dynamically updated crowd-sourced layoff lists.

The food 180

Eating out vs. Eating in

Good restaurants are by their nature small businesses — and they're bearing the brunt of the coronavirus shutdown as locked-down retail and service-sector businesses can shut down and reopen much more easily.

The bottom line: Local farmers aren't just going to be facing the devastation of restaurants at 50% capacity once the shutdown is lifted. A huge number of those restaurants aren't going to reopen at all.

The end of the beginning or beginning of the end

U.S Economy Shrinks 4.8% in the first quarter

It's the biggest quarterly drop in over a decade and shows the beginning of an economic slowdown that's expected to get worse as the coronavirus roils the economy. Economists are bracing for current quarter figures, with some projecting a record annualized decline of about 40%.

The biggest drag was the sharp drop in consumer spending, which makes up about 70% of U.S. economic activity.

Aisle 2020 for sympathy cards

Even at a time of perpetual Zoom gatherings and virtual hugs, big retailers are struggling to keep up with the demand for old-school sympathy cards. CVS, one of the nation’s largest sellers of greeting cards, said it was seeing “higher demand for sympathy cards than most other types of greeting cards during the pandemic” and experiencing shortages in certain stores. Shoppers across the country have posted on social media that their local Winn Dixie or ShopRite was running out of cards.

When she asked an employee about the cards, she was told the store couldn’t keep them in stock.

“You heard about the toilet paper, you heard about the paper towels, you heard about the water,” said Ms. Toye-Sweppenheiser, 57, who runs a used car lot in Factoryville, Pa. “But the cards.”

Inverted Job Boards

Here are a couple sites I've come across that updates daily when news hits of recent layoffs at companies OR have been reported internally from the employees themselves.

Who's freezing hiring from coronavirus | Candor

With coronavirus and a possible recession, many companies are cutting headcount in 2020 and pausing hiring — learn who's affected.

Layoffs.fyi - Tech Layoff Tracker and Startup Layoff Lists

[LIVE] Tracking all tech startup layoffs — and lists of employees laid off — since COVID-19. This page is constantly being updated.