The reason they have been eased in many countries is because
cases, hospital admissions and deaths have declined.
What's delaying economic recovery?
The coronavirus outbreak has been followed by a massive
decline in economic activity in many countries, often blamed
on the lockdowns aimed at stopping the spread of the disease
and limiting the deaths it causes.
In fact, there are two forces at play.
Government rules being one, and voluntary action taken by
individuals and businesses is the other.
If you want to know how quick the recovery will be, you need to
know the extent of each.
To the extent that it's driven by official restrictions, lifting them
would do the trick.
But it will take more than that to reverse personal choices and
habits.
Consumer bounce-back?
That would need real progress to be made in reducing the risk of
infection. Consumers, workers and employers would also have to
be confident in that progress.
There is ample survey evidence of a reluctance to go back quickly
to the pre-pandemic way of life.
IPSOS-Mori found a majority of Britons said they were still
uncomfortable about a wide range of activities, including going to
a bar or restaurant, large public gatherings, using public toilets or
public transport.
This may be one reason why some venues that could reopen are
choosing not to - although the restrictions they would have to
operate under make it harder to earn a profit even if the customers
were to return.
A substantial amount of what consumers spend is what is called
social consumption, where buyers are physically close to each
other - eating out, live entertainment and travel, for example.
When the virus is circulating those activities expose people to the
risk of infection.
The Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis, who looked at the
possible impact of a pandemic more than a decade ago, says the
sectors concerned covered more than a third of consumer
spending.
There is ample anecdotal reporting that as restrictions have eased
this social consumption has resumed to a significant degree.
Declining cases
But is it just because the measures have been eased?
Some people - though not all - will have concluded that it is
relatively safe to go out. So that might be the reason that economic
activity is picking up.
Some economists have tried to disentangle the two elements.
There are some strikingly different conclusions about the balance
between the two.
Research done at the investment bank Goldman Sachs looked
at the relationship between stricter lockdown measures and the
impact on economic activity.
Tougher lockdown measures did correlate with evidence pointing
to sharper economic declines, although that research did not
separate the contribution from fear of infection.
In the US one group from the Universities of Texas, California
and Chicago concluded that it was mostly the lockdown.
Infection rate
They used data from a series of household surveys. They found
that spending by the average American household fell by $1,000
between January and April.
They came to the view that lockdowns accounted for 60% of the
decline in employment and that households under lockdown were
spending on average 31% less than others.
They concluded "the declines in employment and spending can be
largely attributed to lockdowns rather than to the share of the
population infected by the coronavirus."
But others, looking at different evidence, have come to different
conclusions.
Two economists at Chicago University looked at mobile phone
data on customer visits to more than two million businesses.
The fact that different state and county authorities imposed
different restrictions gave them a way of estimating how much of
the downturn was due to those rules.
Denmark and Sweden
They found overall a decline in consumer traffic to these
businesses of 60%.
But their analysis suggested that a little more than a ninth of that
was due to legal restrictions.
They also found that the extent of the declines was linked to the
number of coronavirus deaths in the area.
Their overall conclusion: "Individual choices were far more
important and seem tied to fears of infection".