Forget patients, give oxygen to the economy.

"Like quantitative easing, a lockdown is easy enough to enter, but much harder to exit," wrote Prof Vivek Dahejia. "India's case is perhaps unique among major countries in having locked down early, and then having started to open up after a long lockdown even though coronavirus cases continued to rise." The lockdown was imposed from midnight of 25 March with a notice of just 4 hours. This set off a mad rush in grocers and chemists shops as people panicked.  Desperate crowds of migrant workers packed into train and bus stations to try and get back to their villages. On 24 March, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly declared a 21-day lockdown at 8 pm, the total number of coronavirus cases was 564, whereas, 18,522 new patients, with 418 deaths, were registered in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of cases to 566,840. India is easing lockdown restrictions even as cases are predicted to peak in mid-July to around 260,000 active cases. "Meanwhile, Western countries with generally successful lockdowns had locked down while infections were rising and then unlocked once cases began to fall." "An analysis of countries with the highest Covid-19 cases shows most of them have not relaxed lockdowns without a decline in daily cases," wrote Abhishek Jha and Jamie Mullick. "India is a case in point because it imposed the earliest and strictest lockdown, but eased restrictions before cases peaked." Why? Because it resulted in a jump in unemployment, a fall in electricity consumption, reflecting an almost complete cessation of business activity, and falls in mobility indices in various sectors, reflecting a collapse in consumer demand and in investment, according to members of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Reserve Bank (RBI). Delhi registered much cleaner air as PM 2.5 levels fell in a further sign of life grinding to a halt. "By some estimates, the loss of three months' income would leave nearly half of the country's population mired in poverty, reversing all the gains made since the economy was liberalized in the early 1990s," wrote Mihir Sharma. "Tax revenues are set to crash and India's hitherto relatively stable debt-to-GDP ratio may spike up toward 90%," "leaving little for the welfare measures that will be essential in coming months". "Such economic pressures help explain why the government lifted India's stringent lockdown even though the spread of Covid-19 clearly hadn't been controlled." "The needle on a dial measuring so-called animal spirits swung to the left last month, reflecting weakness in the majority of eight high-frequency indicators compiled by Bloomberg News," wrote Anirban Nag. All this confusion begs the question, why was the lockdown imposed without thinking of consequences? Who will pay by resigning?