Conversely I think the pandemic showed how robust supply chains are. Supply was able to be rapidly reallocated to different products with nothing more than some mild hiccups. The price of cars went up 20% or so, PS5s are hard to find without paying scalpers, and toilet paper is more expensive, but cars, PlayStations, and toilet paper are still being manufactured. Car production went down but electronic device manufacturing as a whole increased. Clothing manufacturing decreased, but mask and PPE production increased 100 fold, as did medical devices and medications.

Also this is a big opportunity for the economy. There's big demand for lots of stuff and companies around the world are scrabbling to adjust. There's also plenty of capital around to invest in them. People are now used to tightening their belts a bit, more picky about their jobs and more willing to embrace change. I think many workers have a good chance to benefit in all this.

We didn't shut down the entire economy. Huge portions of essential workers remained employed throughout, and lockdowns were phased, plus tons of commerce went online. A true economic shutdown would look far worse than this, imagine no hospitals, no grocery stores, no utilities, no stores or services. That is far worse than our partial hiccups here and there.

I say this because the virus could've been 5X more lethal and to young people to boot. Then we might have actually truly shut down, and we'd be in a much worse spot now. There's no rule that the pandemic virus doesn't have to be much more lethal next time.

A more lethal virus would not spread as quickly and effectively as Covid-19, look at the Ebola virus as an example.

That's not true at all. There's no reason something can't be more lethal and more virulent.

Ebola is spread by contact, not in the air, so it's not a good comparison. (Especially because it can spread very quickly even given that it doesn't spread through the air.)

Many experts accept that viruses evolve to be less lethal, and more infectious.

  “I believe that viruses tend to become less pathogenic,” says Burtram Fielding, a coronavirologist at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. “The ultimate aim of a pathogen is to reproduce, to make more of itself. Any pathogen that kills the host too fast will not give itself enough time to reproduce.” [1] 

That same article though says it's tough to generalize evolution. It's possible something could evolve to be more lethal and more infectious. However, that's not in the best interests of maximizing the survival and reproduction of the virus, and that is what evolution typically selects for.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-viruses-ev...

Just because they tend to move towards less lethal doesn’t mean they never can go the other way, as evolution is not a plan or choice. Something increases lethality but extends overall illness time, increases transmissibility, increases asymptomatic time, or a combination would outcompete other less lethal versions. While, in the long run, a less lethal virus would be more beneficial to the virus, that wouldn’t stop a more lethal version from burning through a population until it dies out by destroying its own habitat.

How long will that take? One of the excuses last summer from many Covid downplayers was the exact same sentiments and then along comes the Delta variant in October 2020.

There is no hard and fast rule that a virus will evolve to be less lethal or/and less infectious, just a noticeable downward trend in other instances. Well I'm still waiting for a downward trend even with the vaccination efforts.

What about viruses that are designed rather than evolved?

Why the downvotes? This is a really important question given just how easy it already is to design a virus.

>There's no reason something can't be more lethal and more virulent.

Smallpox.

>What about viruses that are designed rather than evolved?

Biopreparat(tm) Smallpox.

It would be much easier to identity an infected individual for quarantine if a virus had a steep fatality rate, the transmission would be much slower too since dead people don't travel.

Only if the virus makes its presence known quickly. Something can be fatal, yet take months or years to kill you.

Worst case would be a highly lethal, airborne virus with a long delay between infection and death.

Viruses tend not to work like that because to effectively spread via respiratory droplets and aerosols they require a high viral load in the respiratory system. This generally causes symptoms.

I’m sure it’s not completely impossible, but neither is a massive radiation burst from a nearby supernova.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true. SARS-COV-2 actually gives us a model of how a virus can be both.

- Pre-symptomatic transmission

- Early immune evasion and suppression

- Strong inflammatory/cytokine response

I agree COVID seems like more of a counter-point to the idea that supply chains are incredibly fragile.

But who shut down their entire economy? The US laid off maybe a little over 10% of the workforce at its maximum, by the looks, so that's not entirely shut down even at maximum hyperbole.

Of course the “entire” economy wasn’t shut down. But the unemployment rate would have been massively higher than it was had the government not stepped in with loans (essentially grants) to encourage companies to keep people on the payroll through the lockdowns.

There were also companies that kept workers on the payroll despite being essentially shutdown for weeks even without access to PPP money.

> Of course the “entire” economy wasn’t shut down.

That may seem obvious to you and I. Hence my question.

> But the unemployment rate would have been massively higher than it was had the government not stepped in with loans (essentially grants) to encourage companies to keep people on the payroll through the lockdowns.

Would it? What models showed that, and how much higher is massively?

> There were also many companies that kept workers employee on the payroll despite being essentially shutdown for weeks.

There were many companies that that stayed open.

>That may seem obvious to you and I. Hence my question.

I think it seems obvious to everyone, and anyone saying the entire economy was shutdown was just being hyperbolic. Everyone who lived through it knows that they were able to buy groceries and that their power and lights stayed on.

>Would it? What models showed that, and how much higher is massively?

Something like 12 percentage points according to this paper [1].

>There were many companies that that stayed open.

Right. But my point is that unemployment rate isn't everything when discussing what percentage of the economy shutdown. Many people were receiving paychecks despite their company being essentially closed for business.

1. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/226/Job-Preservation-...

So in summary the entire economy was not shut down no matter how grandiose and exaggerated the claim, not when you are trying to use it to substantiate an argument.

The shutdown was an order of magnitude smaller than the entire economy.

Again it was obvious hyperbole, no one ever meant that the entire economy was literally shut down.

However it also wasn’t an order of magnitude less. According to this WSJ report [1], lockdowns took at least 1/4 of the economy offline.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-coronavirus-shutdowns-hav...

It's a plausible position, but is there evidence for it?

Isn't this fundamentally the point of capitalism?

That enlightened, distributed self interest is the only system capable of rapidly reacting to changes such as this?

To prove an oscillatory effect, you'd have to come up with a system in which the end result negatively impacted the original cause.

The strongest case would be in materials pricing, but it seems like that's more demand than labor / supply side.