[Genuine Realist]

I don't think that's true.  The current winners are countries that had a very robust public health system going in (in part due to SARS) and were able to maintain the pandemic under control without shutting down.  Taiwan, despite being close to the epicenter of the pandemic, remained more or less open but has seen 0.03 deaths per 100,000 and a just 1.4% fall in GDP.  South Korea and Germany have also done pretty well by that metric, though restrictions on movement and the hit to GDP in Germany has been higher.

New Zealand is a good case example of a country that imposed a harsh lockdown under the belief that it could keep the virus from entering the country.  Though it has largely succeeded (notwithstanding a recent outbreak), its economy shrank by 12.2% in the second quarter.  Some of that is not its fault; its a country very dependent on tourism and that was going to come to a screeching halt regardless, but still, for New Zealand the lockdown may have been disproportionately harsh and caused an unnecessary hit in GDP.

But by and large, I thin the hit to GDP is going to be strongly proportional to the extent of the outbreak, and less so to the degree of lockdown (once you adjust for the fact that countries with worse pandemics, like Spain and Italy were forced to lock down harder).

BC

In terms of determining winners and losers, I believe that the experience of small island nations, with homogenous populations and little international traffic has next to nothing to say to the larger, populous nations of the world. (New Zealand has a population of 4.9 million, IIRC. Santa Clara County alone has a population of 1.9 million.) They seem to me to be outliers that don't signify too much to the direction of history. If the US MSM wasn't frantically looking for a utopia that solved all the problems of covid without consequence, to throw in the face of Trump, I think the basic irrelevance of the examples would be obvious.

What's going on (I think) are societies trying to find the correct equilibrium between necessary social distancing and the minimum activity you have to have to keep human society afloat. The original metaphor - drastically lockdown for a manageable period until the contagion goes away - was wildly overstated. It has generated enormous cynicism about the much more practical masks-and-six-feet social distancing protocols we are practicing now. (It's not just Trump.) In Europe, there is considerable political resentment about the lockdown, and it is only going to get more intense as it becomes apparent that it did not work to the extent promised.

I'm not going to deviate from the premise of the first post. How this will look in hindsight I don't know. My intuition is that societies with resilient economies and adaptable societies are going to be appreciated the most. I also have a hunch that the drastic lockdown will be viewed as a big mistake, because the virus was much too robust to be defeated by so crude a method. A lot depends on how quickly truly efficacious vaccines become available.

[Genuine Realist]

I don't think that's true.  The current winners are countries that had a very robust public health system going in (in part due to SARS) and were able to maintain the pandemic under control without shutting down.  Taiwan, despite being close to the epicenter of the pandemic, remained more or less open but has seen 0.03 deaths per 100,000 and a just 1.4% fall in GDP.  South Korea and Germany have also done pretty well by that metric, though restrictions on movement and the hit to GDP in Germany has been higher.

New Zealand is a good case example of a country that imposed a harsh lockdown under the belief that it could keep the virus from entering the country.  Though it has largely succeeded (notwithstanding a recent outbreak), its economy shrank by 12.2% in the second quarter.  Some of that is not its fault; its a country very dependent on tourism and that was going to come to a screeching halt regardless, but still, for New Zealand the lockdown may have been disproportionately harsh and caused an unnecessary hit in GDP.

But by and large, I thin the hit to GDP is going to be strongly proportional to the extent of the outbreak, and less so to the degree of lockdown (once you adjust for the fact that countries with worse pandemics, like Spain and Italy were forced to lock down harder).

BC

In terms of determining winners and losers, I believe that the experience of small island nations, with homogenous populations and little international traffic has next to nothing to say to the larger, populous nations of the world. (New Zealand has a population of 4.9 million, IIRC. Santa Clara County alone has a population of 1.9 million.) They seem to me to be outliers that don't signify too much to the direction of history. If the US MSM wasn't frantically looking for a utopia that solved all the problems of covid without consequence, to throw in the face of Trump, I think the basic irrelevance of the examples would be obvious.

What's going on (I think) are societies trying to find the correct equilibrium between necessary social distancing and the minimum activity you have to have to keep human society afloat. The original metaphor - drastically lockdown for a manageable period until the contagion goes away - was wildly overstated. It has generated enormous cynicism about the much more practical masks-and-six-feet social distancing protocols we are practicing now. (It's not just Trump.) In Europe, there is considerable political resentment about the lockdown, and it is only going to get more intense as it becomes apparent that it did not work to the extent promised.

I'm not going to deviate from the premise of the first post. How this will look in hindsight I don't know. My intuition is that societies with resilient economies and adaptable societies are going to be appreciated the most. I also have a hunch that the drastic lockdown will be viewed as a big mistake, because the virus was much too robust to be defeated by so crude a method. A lot depends on how quickly truly efficacious vaccines become available.