Another unanswerable question is whether Western countries would not have fared significantly better if they had gone into covid with balanced budgets and little-to-no public debt

If you have a balanced budget and almost no debt, it's easier to say "this is a catastrophe and it'll add 10-20% of GDP to our debt in 2 months, but, by golly, we'll crush this!"

You pay off bars to close, you pay off everyone that needs paying off and you crush this

Instead, countries went into it with budgets that were designed to be as close to the edge without falling as possible. There was little margin of error

(in the eurozone, budgets have been gamed as much as possible to fit into the letter of the rules, but rarely their spirit)

"COUNTRY-IN-THE-EU cannot afford a lockdown" is something I heard repeatedly. Normally, it was repeated until a lockdown was announced, too late

The one large Western country that has been doing OK is also the one that went into this with its fiscal house in order (Germany)

Maybe, it's just that good governance leads to both fiscal balance and a decent covid response, but I never heard "Germany cannot afford it"

(I know that this thread fits into the "now more than ever, covid shows that the stuff I worried about before is really important" cliché—but that does not mean it's wrong)