The COVID crisis continues: Is the economy adapting or, on the contrary, is the resilience “wearing down”?

The COVID crisis has been going on since the first quarter of 2020 and will continue at least until the summer of 2021, with repeated episodes of severe health restrictions. We can then have two views of the effects of this long crisis on the economy: Either the economic cost of the crisis is declining, because the economy is adapting (by digitising and integrating health standards into production processes); Or the economic cost of the crisis is increasing, because companies' resilience is wearing down due to the length of the crisis, because employees remain away from work for a long time, more and more young people are unable to enter the labour market, uncertainty is driving down investment, etc. When we look at developments in the United States and the euro zone, we see that currently it is rather the economy's ability to adapt that has prevailed in industry and in the United States, but that the economy has rather been “ wearing down ” in services and in Europe.