While some experts foresee some of the strongest economic growth in decades, many are also worried about higher inflation. Recent projections show prices rising about 4.4 percent in 2021, as compared to 2.3 percent in 2019 and 1.7 percent in 2020. April prices moved up 0.8 percent from March for the biggest one-month jump in over a decade. Some of the rise is likely due to depressed prices returning as the economy moves on from the pandemic. According to Yeva Nersisyan, Associate Professor of Economics at Franklin & Marshall College, “we had a whole year where prices didn’t really increase. And for some stuff they actually decreased. So, if you’re comparing this year to that year, then the reading is going to be higher than if the prices had continued to just go up. If there wasn’t a pandemic, the prices would just go up more steadily, and we wouldn’t see that kind of a jump that we saw recently.” Price hikes and shortages across a whole range of products will likely continue to plague consumers in the short-term. Companies have to revive and retool their supply chains in the midst of drastic changes in consumer demand patterns. COVID has changed how and what people consume. How those changes play out in a post-COVID world remains to be seen. Companies, however, have to guess now where demand for their product will be when all the dust settles. Predicting the future is hard enough in a normal economy. It becomes much harder still in an economy emerging from a pandemic. These price changes and shortages are additional side effects of COVID, though economists predict they should improve with time.