No, this couldn't have been avoided. You simply cannot shutdown the economy for four months and not have a disastrous outcome. Somewhere in the economy, people will feel the effect. All you can do is shift the pain from someone to another.
That doesn't make any sense. We can imagine a world in which going out to eat wasn't a thing, and there was no business for the pandemic to destroy. Same with haircuts and anything else that people are doing for themselves now.
There's no amount of pain that's conserved. It's caused by the fact that people changed behavior that others were relying on, but that's a contingent feature of actual history.
People are not code. People are, for lack of better terminology, messy. We are still finding unanticipated outcomes from this mess.
I was reading a journal article yesterday about a separate unanticipated consequence of the coronavirus shutdowns that we may start to have trouble with weather prediction. Why? All those grounded airplanes doubled as automated airborne meteorological observation platforms to help provide the most accurate data possible. There are not enough drones with sufficient altitude rating to replace all those missing commercial air flights as to weather data capture.
I have to assume that's a misunderstanding of something I wrote?
I was saying that pain doesn't follow anything like physical conservation laws. If I fall down the stairs and break my leg, that's not a thing that had to happen to anyone.
Statistically, a lot of people will hurt themselves in similar accidents every year until the end of time, but if I don't live in a house with a staircase, no cosmic law makes someone else get hurt to compensate.
