Recall that the lockdowns were ineffective in preventing the spread of the virus. The COVID relief money was a complete waste. Damn all those guilty of spreading the hysteria.
No, the covid shutdowns were a panicked overreaction by feckless politicians getting stampeded by a sensationalist media. Tens of millions of people with perfectly legitimate jobs were thrown out of work because they were the victims of what amounted to a government lockout. If a foreign power had done what our own governments did as they went full retard, we would have regarded it as an act of war.
That's not idle hyperbole. One of the key precipitants of the American Revolution was the British closing Boston harbor.
The covid shutdowns were a grotesque overreaction. We should be hanging a lot of politicians. But the covid relief program was intended to support working people who had been thrown out of work because they had been locked out by government.
Government shut down hundreds of thousands of perfectly viable small business, especially in the service sector, and forced large cuts even in many larger businesses. The arts and entertainment world was no different in this regard than any other sector. I have zero sympathy if big names like Lil Wayne were spending relief money on private jets and designer clothes. Claw that back and be alert to the possibility of fraud. But I do have sympathy for the working craft people who build the sets, rig the lights, set up the sound systems, and do all the below the line jobs that actually make "movie magic." Or the people who work in the theaters, which were mostly shut down. Or who were waiting tables to pay the rent while scrambling from one audition to another in a very high risk career field.
I have sympathy for the waitresses down at IHop, Applebees, or Outback down at the mall, who lost their jobs because government locked them out. They are no different from the actresses sharing apartments with three roommates while they all wait tables as they sprint from audition to audition hoping for their next acting gig. Very, very few actors are living the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The substantial majority of SAG-AFTRA members don't make enough from acting to qualify for the union insurance plan. Most are working side jobs to pay the rent -- and those are very often in the service sector where a lot of jobs can be structured to accommodate people who need to be taking time to audition, and that allow people to come, go, and come back easily as acting gigs dictate. LA, NYC, Nashville and other entertainment hubs famously have a business culture in the service sector that accommodates this. These are precisely the kinds of perfectly useful "real" jobs that got shut down by politicians going full retard.
Policy stupidities aside, there is an underlying intellectual cancer here that should be recognized. In a very real sense during covid, American government (especially in the blue states and cities) declared war on the American people. But the background factor is that the government sector was fully protected. Government workers got paid. Essential people came to work. But many millions of federal, state and local government workers just stopped coming to the office and pretended to work from home. The good ones actually did work from home and kept things like Social Security checks and Medicare reimbursements flowing. Essential workers reported as usual; the air traffic controllers showed up, as did the meat inspectors in the packing plants, police and fire personnel, the military, etc. But many parts of government are overlayered and bloated, and the deadwood got a long, fully paid covid vacation.
The politicians who went full retard on covid are basically creatures of government and government unions, and their core base was fully protected. Their reflexive default option is to blindly assume that the rest of the economy should operate like government. And they are happy to impose government norms on everyone else. Government just printed money to keep its people (and beneficiaries) paid. The socialists don't care that the private sector can't print money. They think everyone should work for government.