| Shrnutí: | The Covid-19 pandemic has put forecasting under the spotlight, pitting epidemiological models
against extrapolative time series devices. We have been producing real-time short term forecasts of
confirmed cases and deaths using robust statistical models since 20 March 2020. The forecasts are
adaptive to abrupt structural change, a major feature of the pandemic data due to data measurement
errors, definitional and testing changes, policy interventions, technological advances, and rapidly
changing trends. The pandemic has also led to abrupt structural change in macroeconomic outcomes.
Using the same methods we forecast aggregate UK unemployment over the pandemic. The forecasts
rapidly adapt to the employment policies implemented when the UK entered the first lockdown. The
gap between our statistical and theory-based forecasts provide a measure of the effect of furlough
policies on stabilizing unemployment, establishing useful scenarios had furlough policies not been
implemented.
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