That seems hard to believe, since significantly more people die every year of all causes than could possibly have died of Covid, even if every single person in the world caught it. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was different.
> even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy.
Maybe so, but the economy is not the only or even the most important casualty of our Covid response. The importance of human social gatherings, the freedom to leave one’s home and go wherever one pleases, the education of children, and so on cannot be measured in economic terms.
> The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it.
Places where there were very few or only brief restrictions, like Serbia, Belarus, or Florida, largely avoided the issues I described above with only a small or in some cases unmeasurable increase in all cause mortality for 2020.
Sweden is an interesting example. Comparing Sweden and Finland, for instance, older people essentially cloistered themselves in Sweden because they had no trust that they'd be safe in society, and their spending dropped by a higher amount than old people in Finland, who changed their habits less due to the swift and more stringent government response? My old-person family members in Finland were able to keep shopping, going to church, and having birthday parties with many families due to that response (as opposed to in the US where we limited ourselves to gatherings with max 3 households and did everything masked or outdoors due to several people still working on site).
Perhaps you live in a very different place. You certainly interpret statistics quite differently given your example of Florida.
The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it. Personally, I tend to think governments under-reacted in most Western countries. I'm not sure how things would have returned to "normal" if the virus was raging out of control. A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever. I'm assuming you mean by "normal" that people would return to some normal pattern of economic activity - and even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy.