A better lesson to learn is that shutting down major sectors of the economy was dumb. It was a total overreaction, and proved to be completely ineffective in controlling the pandemic. If politicians hasn't done that then there wouldn't have been a risk of an economic crash in the first place.
> If politicians hasn't done that then there wouldn't have been a risk of an economic crash in the first place.
This is naive and ignores the real sequence of events.
Things like conferences were getting canceled before the first official government actions in the US. Groceries were being hoarded. People were paying attention to events. The government sticking its head in the sand or just repeating "everything is fine, stay calm" messages wouldn't have prevented any impact.
Uncertainty is an economic killer. And if you remember early on, that uncertainty also led to a lot less controversy over the canceled events and restrictions than arose later. (Though in retrospect, even many "paranoid" estimates back then were far less than a million US deaths...)
Some level of stimulus was almost certain to be necessary regardless of official Covid actions in March 2020 unless you wanted to just let those companies and workers drown as people chose to change their behavior.
(The "restrictions should've been loosened earlier" argument is a much more reasonable one, but IMO still ignores how much of this was already local by winter of 2020, and also that at that point the initial economic damage was done.)
(That's before getting into the recklessness of assuming future severe novel diseases won't be even more deadly on limited early data...)
