There have been far more lethal pandemics. What was dramatically new about coronavirus in 2020 was the scale of the response. And that begs a question. As the Financial Times’s chief economic commentator Martin Wolf put it, Why . . . has the economic damage of such a comparatively mild pandemic been so huge? The answer is: because it could be. Prosperous people can easily dispense with a large proportion of their normal daily expenditures, while their governments can support affected people and businesses on a huge scale. . . . The response to the pandemic is a reflection of economic
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