The lockdown was overkill - Viruses themselves don't devastate economies!

"The virus caused the economic damage!"

A common argument emerging from the press in recent days is that the economic damage associated with COVID-19 was an inevitable result of the virus itself, and cannot be attributed to the lockdowns. The reasoning is that people scaled back their economic activity due to the risk of the virus itself, which would have severely damaged the hardest-hit businesses (retail, food, entertainment, travel). Therefore the lockdowns could not have caused the harm we have witnessed.

This is a stupid, tendentious argument that exists only to rationalize and provide cover for a series of ill-thought policy interventions that we are now discovering to have been largely pointless overkill.

Keep in mind that nobody - literally nobody - is contending that things would be just fine and dandy in those industries without the lockdowns. Rather, what the lockdowns did was to remove the ability of affected businesses to weather the economic storm as their own individual circumstances permitted.

One size fits all policy.

Lockdowns are a one size fits all rule that specifically preempts adaptation strategies from even being explored by the business owner. Businesses in a non-lockdown state might consider things like reducing capacity and hours, furloughing staff for the duration, or only laying off part of their staff. Such actions certainly reflect a severe economic hit, but they also allow some affected businesses to survive the pandemic intact and preserve at least some of the jobs they previously provided.

By contrast, businesses in lockdown states were denied any of those options. Most could not afford to retain any staff beyond a couple of weeks. And after a couple of months, many of the businesses themselves may never reopen again. The lockdowns, and only the lockdowns, are responsible for that outcome.