My answer is no, because it was the government that kept people home, shut down activities, and basically stopped our economy in it's tracks.
I get this, but I think there's a certain fallacy here that if the government didn't shut things down, everything would have proceeded normally like COVID didn't exist.
I'm not sure I buy that. In a lot of places the shutdowns were fairly short-lived (note: this doesn't include schools, which in too many places stayed remote). Things began to reopen even here in Commiefornia by summer 2020. By that time you *could* start going out to restaurants, bars, etc. It wasn't a forced shutdown. And even to the extent it was, a shutdown can persist as long as people want it to persist--we're a nation of disobedience, and people would [and did] flaunt shutdowns when they decided they wanted to.
The thing is, people changed their behavior
voluntarily and restricted how often they were willing to go out. Until we started getting the vaccines and until COVID changed into the Omicron variant that was less deadly, a lot of people simply still stayed home because they chose to stay home. And when people went out, they social distanced, and they wore masks, and they generally tried NOT to get COVID or spread it.
In a lot of cases, I criticize how government takes credit for doing something that people do on their own and then codifies it in the law like it was their idea. In this case, we may be overly blaming government for something that people did on their own and the government acting like they were telling us to do it.
So I don't necessarily buy that the economy would have recovered/performed just fine if we didn't have stimulus.
