I don't think anyone is arguing that wearing a mask and distancing can help prevent the spread.

As surprising as it may sound, there are actually people arguing those very points. I know, it's really hard to understand. But there are people who go so far as to argue that mask-wearing increases chances of getting sick. It's amazing the tortured reasoning that people can employ to force the result of an analysis to match their desired answer.

I believe many of the economic impacts of the virus would have happened without a formal lockdown. Many people would have stopped non-essential activities regardless of a formal lockdown. I used to eat out every day. For now, I don't eat out at restaurants (although I still get takeout sometimes), despite being allowed to. And I've spoke with many other people who follow this same pattern.

I understand your concern about a required shutdown. Such actions should never be undertaken lightly.

But I think it's a mistake to think no action should have been taken. In fact, I think the actions undertaken were too slow and haphazard, and hence not nearly effective as they should have been. You're arguing that "there is no way a government is going to stop a virus that incubates for 1-2 weeks", but we have directly contradictory evidence from a number of countries around the world. There's a clear correlation in the number of cases/fatality rates and the swiftness and decisiveness of actions taken by the governments in different countries (although medical infrastructure also plays a big part in fatality rates).

Here's a quick sample of what I would have done. I don't have time to go into great detail, because real detail would involve real research and thinking. But these are just some obvious things that came to my mind when we first learned of the virus spreading in China and the response there:

• Initially locked down as soon as we saw what was going on in China. Why? Because we didn't have good data as to the severity of the situation, and it was possibly quite dire. I actually told most of our staff in the US to begin working from home a week before there was a lockdown anywhere in the US. IMO, this was just common sense. And I later found that our overseas manager quickly took similar actions on his own there.
• Simultaneously, we should have created interdisciplinary taskforces to analyze how the virus was likely to impact business supply chains, figure out ways to mitigate those problems, and share all their findings with affected companies. If you're an an extreme capitalist, you might think such things should be handled by companies without outside involvement, but that's just not the way real companies operate, unfortunately. They don't share sufficient data to even know where such problems will occur.
• Beyond that, the government should have passed laws to handle predictable problems that would likely result from the pandemic. As a simple example, we should have immediately suspended evictions. This is another case of common sense: even if you don't care about people losing their homes, it should be obvious that displacing people is only going to lead to spreading of the virus.

If we'd done all these things, I believe we would have already "managed" this crisis, and we would have created all the necessary new infrastructure and policies to be back at near full productive output. As a bonus, we'd be more resistant to future outbreaks of other viruses.