SlideshowBob
Active Member
That's an important point. We're often sold this idea of a trade-off between covid and 'the economy,' but it's nowhere near that straightforward. The pubs, restaurants etc were always going to take a big hit, lockdown or no, simply because people wouldn't take the risk of going to them. It probably does no more damage to lock down and support them through it than just to let the virus run its course. Moreover, one lesson people have taken from the 1918 pandemic, and which in some places seems to have been borne out by experience of this one, is that the best way to minimise the damage is to lock down early and hard, because that way you can return to something like normal more quickly.
Indeed, once you've got any sort of situation that's going to significantly hit economic activity then a downturn is inevitable irrespective of whether you take deliberate actions which ensure it'll happen. Sweden may see their economy harmed slightly less than some of their nearby neighbours, but then real questions have to be asked whether it was worth their GDP falling by a little by less if they ended up with four times as many deaths as, say, Norway or Finland.