Hungarian Central Bank governor György Matolcsy has called for an end to the coronavirus lockdowns in the U.S. and says the lockdown will have enormous costs for health of workers by making them poorer  

Matolcsy was disputing the conclusions of a Financial Times opinion piece entitled Premature US reopening plays Russian roulette with its workers, saying that it was the lockdown itself in the United States that has caused the real problem.

“Contrary to what Edward Luce honestly but wrongly suggests to us… it is not the reopening but total lockdown that plays Russian roulette with workers,” Matolcsy wrote in his regular column on Hungarian financial portal Novekedes.hu.

The FT article tries to argue that the coronavirus lockdown is a danger to the health of Americans.

The majority of states are now easing their lockdowns,” the FT opinion piece reads. “This poses two dangers. The first is that most states have rising or flat rates of Covid-19 infection. The second is that workers who don’t show up for work risk losing their current income, whether that was stay-at-home wages or unemployment benefits.”

In contrast, Matolcsy is of the opinion that it was the full lockdown that have wreaked havoc with employees’ lives.

“They could lose their jobs now, or they can suffer from lower incomes later due to the huge losses of the whole economy. In the latter case, they might move to poorer zip code areas or face a higher probability of dying in the coming new waves of this pandemic or the next one,” Matolcsy writes, adding that “some governments should not have let masses of people be taken to hospitasl and should not have introduced total lockdowns.”

Title image: Hungarian Central Bank Governor György Matolcsy. (Magyar Hírlap/Péter Papajcsik)