> this is also different because there isn't an economic causal factor. we intentionally stopped everything.

Yes we intentionally stopped things, but that would have happened either way as the disease spread and people got sick.

Look at the meat packing plant in SD where 1 case turned into ~300 and they had to shut down [1]. If we had not shut down things, that would be the story at workplaces across the country. Think about schools and universities throughout the country. If they had not shut down as the pandemic was ramping up, they would have become breeding grounds for the disease and would have had to shut down anyway as students and teachers fell ill.

Yes we shut down things intentionally but our hand was forced. The flip side of this is we cannot re-open things just as intentionally because the result will be a flare-up of cases. So while it may seem like we have control over when we start/stop the economy here, really the virus is controlling the timeline.

[1] https://abc7news.com/smithfied-foods-coronavirus-meat-packin...

I can't find the studies at the moment but there's at least one looking at previous pandemics that supports your suggestion. They found that economies that instituted weaker public health responses had bigger casualties from illness directly, and longer times to economic recovery because of bigger losses in personnel etc.

I wonder if lack of public health infrastructure in the us will come to haunt it in the coming months as other countries recover faster and get a head start. That sort of economic opportunity cost from not having more public health infrastructure tends to have been left out of past discussions completely.

Yes exactly. This is completely uncharted, especially when you consider it is world wide, almost instantly.

There have been national strikes in some countries before - perhaps we should be looking at the impact of them to try to understand this.

The lockdown isn't the only reason for the current economic crisis. Look at what was happening in the repo market a few months back before Coronavirus was even a thing.

I thought the repo market was mainly due to regulation drying up liquidity in that market. It didn;t seem to me like a larger concern. What are your thoughts on it?

What regulations are you referring to? I didn't look to deeply into it but I interpreted it as companies wanting to hold cash more instead of lending because they expected a crash.