“If we think about the ways that companies collect data, it ranges so widely from different company,” said George Washington University’s Tara Sinclair. “That’s why it’s so important that we have government statistical agencies.”

So-called high frequency data also paints a picture of how the delta coronavirus variant is affecting the economy.

For Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley, the pandemic meant scrapping all the models and going back to the fundamentals.