To add some data to that: there is a correlation between disease spread and GDP reduction, and it's the one that consistent with your anecdote: The economic impact is greater where the disease is left unchecked :

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy, and then specificaly this scatterplot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...

(unfortunately, the graph doesn't include countries like china, vietnam, and many other asian countries, because that would make the trend even clearer.)