Page 37 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

their core will enable an economic recovery, adding: “If
governments fail to save lives, people afraid of the virus will not

resume shopping, traveling, or dining out. This will hinder
economic recovery, lockdown or no lockdown.”

Only future data and subsequent analysis will provide
incontrovertible proof that the trade-off between health and the
economy does not exist. That said, some US data collected in the

early phases of reopening in some states showed a drop in
spending and working even before the lockdown. [24] Once people
began to worry about the pandemic, they effectively started to

“shut down” the economy, even before the government had
officially asked them to do so. A similar phenomenon took place
after some American states decided to (partially) reopen:
consumption remained subdued. This proves the point that

economic life cannot be activated by fiat, but it also illustrates the
predicament that most decision-makers experienced when having
to decide whether to reopen or not. The economic and societal
damage of a lockdown is glaringly obvious to everybody, while

success in terms of containing the outbreak and preventing
deaths – a prerequisite for a successful opening – is more or less
invisible. There is no public celebration when a coronavirus case
or death doesn’t happen, leading to the public-health policy

paradox that “when you do it right, nothing happens”. This is why
delaying the lockdown or opening too early was always such a
strong policy temptation. However, several studies have since
shown how such a temptation carried considerable risk. Two, in

particular, coming to similar conclusions with different
methodologies, modelled what could have happened without
lockdown. According to one conducted by Imperial College
London, wide-scale rigorous lockdowns imposed in March 2020

averted 3.1 million deaths in 11 European countries (including the
UK, Spain, Italy, France and Germany). [25] The other, led by the
University of California, Berkeley, concluded that 530 million total

infections, corresponding to 62 million confirmed cases, were
averted in six countries (China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France
and the US) by the confinement measures that each had put into
place. [26] The simple conclusion: in countries afflicted with

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