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Notes -
The problem I have with your theory is the assumption that things would have just continued along as normal if it hadn't been for those meddling lockdowns and stimulus payments. The weekend before lockdown I was at a birthday party at a restaurant in Pittsburgh, and the place was practically deserted. This was at a popular restaurant at 7 pm on the Saturday of St. Patrick's Day weekend in one of the busiest nightlife destinations in the city. After businesses had reopened, owners complained about capacity restrictions, but even at 25% capacity I had no problem getting a table the few times I went out; it's not like people were lining up out the door to get one of the few available spots. I also think that the politics of the lockdowns shaped how a lot of people viewed the virus. If you thought the lockdowns were a prime example of government overreach, then chances are you also thought the virus wasn't that bad. I know I thought this way. I don't know that this happens to the extent that it did if businesses stayed open the whole time and no restrictions were put in place, the upshot being that conservative leaning people would have been more likely to be concerned about the virus since tribal politics weren't implicated to the same extent. If the virus began running rampant in some parts of the US in late March or April, there would have been a major depression of economic activity, even if it were clear that business closures weren't on the table.
A lot of businesses wouldn't be able to justify keeping staffing levels at pre-pandemic levels in such a scenario, and they'd be forced to make cuts. It's hard to see any scenario where there's no stimulus payments, no mortgage forbearance, and no student loan pause that still sees the COVID recession being as short as it was. People seem to forget that the market was in freefall in the early days of COVID, and it was only when it became clear that the US government would put some kind of protections in place that the market started to recover. If all the predictions the Treasury Department was making in March 2020 had come true, we could be in a situation now where instead of complaining about inflation we're complaining about a persistently high unemployment rate, and instead of complaining about housing costs we're complaining about a moribund housing market that's caused massive layoffs in the construction sector. I'm not trying to argue that the powers that be made all the right moves with respect to the pandemic, just that we aren't in a position to second-guess them and assume things would have necessarily been better had they done nothing.
As mentioned in my post, people believe that the government had to do something. I stand by the position that the panic was a result of media and government messaging rather than an organic development, but I obviously have no way of proving that. Whether I'm right or wrong about what the governments should have done and how people would have reacted, governments did what they did and it had the completely unsurprising consequences that we've seen play out. I think it's weird that people still defend it even with the current available knowledge, but it doesn't really matter what I think, it matters that most people think it was basically fine (or not aggressive enough!), so there are no riots over the consequences of lockdowns, restrictions, and helicopter money.
The initial wariness during early COVID was reasonable under ignorance. To sum up what my faulty memory tells me I thought in early 2020: "New respiratory virus, something about 5% death rate, seems to spread very quickly." It seemed reasonable to stay home a bit more.
I believe you're correct about government/media messaging, more correct as the pandemic (response) went on, but in the initial stage I think the "panic" was much more organic.
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