> People are too afraid about getting sick and dying to go outside
This is still a response to the pandemic, just a non-governmental one. I'm not saying such a response isn't justified, but it is not directly attributable to the disease.
If a hurricane came and destroyed a bunch of people's homes and businesses and people stopped working, it would be more reasonable to say that "the hurricane caused mass unemployment" than it would be to say "the hurricane didn't cause unemployment, it was just people's individual decisions to not work out of a pile of flooded rubble that's causing the unemployment."
This doesn't seem like a fair analogy for a number of reasons. But mostly just that COVID itself is not destroying businesses, whereas a hurricane literally is.
A hurricane isn't directly destroying anything except the building the business operates from; the business still exists. In principle employees could still walk to the rubble to work and customers could walk to the rubble to exchange money for services, but the material conditions make both of those untenable, in the same way the material conditions of COVID make working and buying things untenable.
This is still a response to the pandemic, just a non-governmental one. I'm not saying such a response isn't justified, but it is not directly attributable to the disease.