Covid-19 caused an abrupt disruption in the world economy and posed big challenges to macroeconomic and time-series analysis. The deep trough in the business cycle was unprecedented in momentum and magnitude, was not approached smoothly, and the pandemic shock was not heralded by any warning...

The Covid-19 epidemic affected the ability of traditional forecasting models to produce reliable scenarios for the evolution of economic activity. We combine macroeconomic variables with epidemiological indicators to account for the Covid-19 shock and predict the short-term evolution of Italian...