According to this paper[1] public health interventions temporarily depress the economy but it quickly bounces back. OTOH widespread death due to choosing not to intervene depresses the economy for much longer.
You're telling me that a paper about the outcome of something that happened 100 years ago in the US is valid for something happening now in Brazil (or other less developed countries)? From their Conclusion:
"Finally, when interpreting our findings, there several important caveats to keep in
mind. First, our analysis is limited to data on 30 states and 43 to 66 cities. Second, data
on manufacturing activity is not available in all years, so we cannot carefully examine
pre-trends between 1914 and 1919 for the manufacturing activity outcomes. Third, the
economic environment toward the end of 1918 was unusual due to the end of WWI.
Fourth, while there are important economic lessons from the 1918 Flu for today’s COVID-
19 pandemic, we stress the limits of external validity. Estimates suggest that 1918 Flu
was more deadly than COVID-19, especially for prime-age workers, which also suggests
more severe economic impacts of the 1918 Flu. The complex nature of modern global
supply chains, the larger role of services, and improvements in communication technology
are mechanisms we cannot capture in our analysis, but these are important factors for
understanding the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19."
It's not great evidence for intervention but it's good evidence against the idea that curtailing intervention will save the economy. Many people seem to be assuming the latter.
Edit: I'm not advocating either. I believe that we can have our cake and eat it too: reopen the economy AND keep people from dying. It requires two things. Massive testing and tracing (https://medium.com/@sten.linnarsson/to-stop-covid-19-test-ev...), and allowing businesses to reopen when they have proper protection, isolation and cleaning protocols in place.
Of course both these things require large amounts of money so developing nations are screwed, as usual.
The public health interventions the paper covers do not appear to rise to the level of what is currently being done in many countries. There are entire sectors of the economy that are effectively producing zero output (hospitality, tourism, transportation) in most countries. Furthermore, the economy is very different today than it was in 1918.
You forgot the part about some (less fortunate) economies depending heavily on exporting consumer (discretionary) goods to developed countries, which means that the dip in spending in US/Europe/China will lead to a big downturn in these countries.