It will be foolish to shut down the economy now, when the pandemic is retreating. Most of the pharma companies have also announced that the vaccines will be available in the market from next month onwards. And also, from what we have seen lockdowns have only a limited impact in reducing the number of deaths from COVID 19. Countries which refused to impose any sort of lockdowns were the first to recover (examples are Pakistan and African nations).
The pandemic is not retreating. Are you even paying attention? The US is very nearly out of hospital space due to the surge of infections. Every day for the last 9 days we've set a new record for most infections. Deaths are skyrocketing. Absolutely nothing is getting better. If a vaccine gets approved tomorrow it will take 8-12 months to distribute nationally. Pakistan and Africa are so poor and have such poor tracking and reporting abilities that data coming out of them on Covid infections are useless for comparing to developed economies. If you want an apt comparison, look at equally developed countries where some have imposed lockdowns and some didn't and you will see that the rate of infection was always lower in those that imposed lockdowns, and the stricter the lockdown the better the data. Even look at the US where the southern states largely had lax lockdowns vs northern states that had stricter, and the data speaks for itself.
