For an idea of what the U.S. economy is going to look like in a month's time, look east.

China, which in late January began the lockdown of Wuhan city, where the coronavirus pandemic first spread, just released some economic data for February, and it is not good.

The country's industrial production in the January-February period dropped 13.5% year over year, the biggest decline on record, according to data compiled by Refinitiv, and widely missed the Econoday consensus estimate of a 1.5% increase. Production by state holding enterprises fell 7.9%, while private-sector output fell 20.2%, data from the country's National Bureau of Statistics showed.

Fixed-asset investment, excluding rural households, dropped 24.5% year over year, to 3.332 trillion yuan. Retail sales decreased 20.5% year over year, to 5.213 trillion yuan. Sales in urban areas fell 20.7%, while those in rural areas declined by 19.0%. Online retail sales dropped 3.0%.

"As the early data from China has demonstrated, growing restrictions on person-to-person contact will affect economic activity," S&P Global Ratings wrote in a research report March 17. "There are no empirical rules to estimate how this social distancing could affect key economic variables."

US manufacturing slump

The U.S. has yet to release any hard economic data for the current month, but the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's monthly gauge of manufacturing activity, released March 16, fell by the most on record, indicating some bad numbers are due in April.

The New York Fed's Empire State Manufacturing Survey showed its general business conditions index slumped 34.4 points to negative 21.5 in March, compared to a nine-month high of 12.9 in February. The consensus estimate of economists polled by Econoday was for an index reading of 4.8.

READ MORE: Sign up for our weekly coronavirus newsletter here, and read our latest coverage on the crisis here.

Both the indexes for new orders and shipments slid to negative territory, dropping 31.4 points and 20.6 points to negative 9.3 and negative 1.7, respectively. Manufacturers' expectations of general business conditions weakened sharply, as the relevant index declined 21.7 points to 1.2, the lowest level since 2009.

Economists have been slashing their estimates for U.S. growth. Goldman Sachs on March 15 lowered its second-quarter U.S. growth estimate to negative 5% from zero, with the first quarter seen at zero versus a previous estimate of 0.7%. However, it predicted a strong rebound in the second half of the year, with third- and fourth-quarter growth coming in at 3% and 4%, respectively.

"We expect US economic activity to contract sharply in the remainder of March and throughout April as virus fears lead consumers and businesses to continue to cut back on spending such as travel, entertainment, and restaurant meals," wrote Goldman Sachs economists led by Jan Hatzius. "Our baseline assumption is that activity will start to recover after April and that H2 will see strong sequential growth, but the specifics depend on a number of important questions."

"Some [of the questions] are medical, including the extent to which social distancing and seasonally higher temperatures will reduce infections as well as whether good treatments will emerge," Hatzius said. "Others are behavioral and economic, including how quickly reduced infections will bring back everyday activities and how effective easier monetary and fiscal policy will be in providing support."

Free money

The Trump administration accelerated its response to the looming economic crisis March 17 when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin proposed sending $1,000 checks directly to U.S. residents as he negotiates a stimulus package with lawmakers. He also proposed 90-day deferrals of federal income tax payments of up to $1 million for individuals and $10 million for corporations.

The House on March 14 passed a stimulus bill developed in conjunction with Mnuchin, though a companion bill has yet to come out of the Senate to be signed by President Donald Trump. The House bill includes free COVID-19 testing, paid sick and family leave, and unemployment and food assistance.

The Fed on March 15 also slashed its benchmark interest rate to near zero for the first time since the Great Recession and implemented a $700 billion quantitative easing program to stimulate economic activity.

While many are predicting a rapid rebound for the economy once the epidemic has passed, data from China suggests that getting people back to work may take longer than hoped.

"We now have China as a model for how the virus' spread could stabilize and society could begin to return to normal," S&P Global Ratings said in its March 17 report. "As China has shown, restrictions could be lifted more slowly than originally thought as public health concerns persist."

"It is difficult to measure how much output will be permanently lost as a result of COVID-19," S&P Global Ratings said. "While the focus now is rightly on containing the virus and measuring its downside effects, the strength of the eventual recovery will depend crucially on how much output can be replaced."