Page 38 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

registered COVID-19 cases that, at the peak, were roughly
doubling every two days, governments had no reasonable

alternative but to impose rigorous lockdowns. Pretending
otherwise is to ignore the power of exponential growth and the
considerable damage it can inflict through a pandemic. Because
of the extreme velocity of the COVID-19 progression, the timing

and forcefulness of the intervention were of the essence.

1.2.2. Growth and employment

Before March 2020, never had the world economy come to
such an abrupt and brutal stop; never before had anyone alive

experienced an economic collapse so dramatic and drastic both in
its nature and pace.

The shock that the pandemic has inflicted on the global
economy has been more severe and has occurred much faster
than anything else in recorded economic history. Even in the

Great Depression in the early 1930s and the Global Financial
Crisis in 2008, it took several years for GDP to contract by 10% or
more and for unemployment to soar above 10%. With the

pandemic, disaster-like macroeconomic outcomes – in particular
exploding unemployment levels and plunging GDP growth –
happened in March 2020 over the course of just three weeks.
COVID-19 inflicted a crisis of both supply and demand that led to
the deepest dive on record for the global economy for over 100

years. As the economist Kenneth Rogoff warned: “Everything
depends on how long it lasts, but if this goes on for a long time,
it’s certainly going to be the mother of all financial crises.” [27]

The length and acuteness of the downturn, and its subsequent
hit to growth and employment, depend on three things: 1) the
duration and severity of the outbreak; 2) each country’s success
at containing the pandemic and mitigating its effects; and 3) the
cohesiveness of each society in dealing with the post-confinement

measures and the various opening strategies. At the time of
writing (end of June 2020), all three aspects remain unknown.
Renewed waves of outbreaks (big and small) are occurring,

countries’ success at containing the outbreak can either last or

37