I think you guys are severely underestimating the scope of the economic meltdown that is coming our way. You're focusing on early projections of GDP drop that various analysts have essentially pulled out of their asses. It is my amateur estimate that they are either doing it out of ignorance, at least the stupid ones, and maybe some of them are throwing up smoke so that their parent companies can dump some of their market positions. Check this out.
The US GDP is close to 20 trillion dollars. As of now, the US has more than 130 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. Fiscal imbalances, if you will, this is basically the cost of healthcare and pension liabilities that are in the pay as you go scheme. The government does not have money to pay for any amount of this, and is hoping that future growth, coupled with monetary and fiscal policies will somehow make up for this unrealistic lack of money. I'm too lazy to look up current numbers for EU member states, but the last I remember, from three or four years ago, it varied from member state to member state, but unfunded liabilities ranged between 250 and 1500 percent of GDP. This is really similar to the savings accounts of people all over the West who are also burdened with mortgages, they are supposed to have some savings and every financial planner appearing on Oprah will tell them they need to save money, but nobody really knows how one is supposed to save money with a dozen credit cards, a mortgage and yearly holidays. Now they don't even have a job anymore!
As far as monetary and fiscal policies are concerned, many European central banks and EU member states have been running the completely novel experiment of printing money and issuing bonds with negative interest rates. Japan is doing the same thing. As the market gurus say, this may be a good or bad thing, but there isn't enough data to give an estimate, kinda like the Covid19 CFR (I'm actually laughing out loud now). The US Federal Funds rate fares a little better, 1.75 as of now, but just watch it decline in the next few weeks. Now how are these fiscal stimuli that everybody is pulling supposed to be funded? Well, of course, the central banks are gonna be printing money and buying government bonds, since this has proven to be so effective in the past decade, just watch the spectacular growth we have seen.Do the math on what this does to interest rates and currency valuations. Additionally, the EU is suspending an article from the Treaty on the functioning of the EU that prohibits member states from directly subsidising their industries, so it's gonna be a free-for-all spending spree to match the trillions of dollars the US is ready to throw into the pot. The only problem is, there is nobody who can pay for the whole thing, since all the "ammo" (central bankers love this word) is gone, you can't even bill it to a client since the clients (the taxpayers, amirite) are getting summarily fired.
This macroeconomic shit concerns all of us, because the only reason we thought we had any money up until two weeks ago was because of this central banker game of mirrors. What you have as a direct result of this is that asset prices in the West have shot up to spectacular levels, from real estate to cars to equities, which have all been financed with low interest loans, which we all thought were cool due to the low interest. So, no, business closures are pretty much a non-issue at this point, the functioning capitalist economies were dead in the water the second the virus spread from China. Everything we thought we owned was gonna be worth as much as the rolls of toilet paper people are stacking the as soon the first country defaulted on its loans. As far as our friends from China are concerned, they are running the greatest social experiment of all time, moving a billion people from the countryside to newly constructed monster cities. The premise is simple, they are gonna be paid in peanuts to provide cheap labor for Western companies moving its supply chain to countries where the pesky workers are happy to work for peanuts, because it beats starving to death when state bureaucrats are running agricultural production. The only problem is, they need an annual growth in GDP in the range of six to ten percent for the whole thing to work, and they have been conducting some hard core currency engineering to achieve it. It was working out really well, low currency makes exports even cheaper, and you can always count on good old greed, but since the monetary Ponzi scheme in the West is going bust, that target is proving to be really hard to hit, and these goddamn peanuts are getting ridiculously expensive right now. God only know what the Committee will come up with now, maybe decree a return to pastoral life? We need a Goldman Sachs guy to predict this, it is way beyond my pay grade.
So we may as well keep the lockdowns in place, because a) this will only make everything move faster; and b) we actually want as many of the generation that presided over this humongous clusterfuck to stay alive long enough to see the effects of their labor on their progeny. I suggest you make peace with all the people you wronged, not because it will help you much in this life, they are gonna be as poor as you, but the only sensible thing to worry about now is karma and future reincarnations. I'm trying to get on Vishnu's good side and have him transport me to some year before paper was invented.