[xenocratus]

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."

[bryanlarsen]

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.