In questo stralcio dal FT si sostiene che i comportamenti volontari di fronte alla percezione del virus ,hanno avuto molta importanza.
"It’s a reminder that there is more to this pandemic than what governments tell us to do.
Each of us has our own feelings about what is safe. Those emotions have shaped the arc of the pandemic.
They will also define the path of the recovery. Consider the impact of lockdowns.
Common sense suggests they have been decisive in driving the disease into retreat, but they have not been the only factor.
Hand-washing, handshake-aversion and working from home began long before legal enforcement.
A working paper from the economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson tries to separate out the effect of mandatory measures from voluntary ones in the US.
For example, Illinois imposed restrictions before Wisconsin did. The researchers looked at activity on either side of such borders, using cell-phone data to track journeys to shops and other businesses.
They were able to gain insight into how much of shutdown was effectively voluntary.
The answer: a surprisingly large proportion. “Total foot traffic fell by more than 60 percentage points,” they write.
“Legal restrictions explain only around 7 percentage points of that.”
ùA similar message comes from a comparison of Denmark, which had a firm lockdown, with Sweden, with its notoriously light-touch approach.
Aggregate spending dropped 29 per cent in Denmark and 25 per cent in Sweden.
That means voluntary measures did much of the damage to the economy — and, one hopes, have delivered much of the public-health benefit too.
I wouldn’t put too much weight on the precise numbers, but the basic message is important.
People didn’t lock down merely because governments told them to.
Now the converse applies: just because shopping is legal again does not mean people will rush out to the shops.
In Germany, they did: Germans spent mor
in May 2020 than they did in May 2019, suggesting that not only were they willing to visit the shops, they wanted to make up for lost time.
That is encouraging, but only up to a point. Germany had a good crisis by western standards, with fewer than 10,000 excess deaths, compared with 25,000 in France, nearly 50,000 in Italy and Spain, and more than 65,000 in the UK.
The US is currently averaging about a hundred times as many daily new cases as Germany.
Perhaps Germans feel safe because they are safe. Not everyone can say that. Once the virus is suppressed, then a sharp recovery is possible. "
Viva HK
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