Because you can't hit pause on your liabilities. Double entry bookkeeping doesn't give a care about your virus. Your liabilities are someone else's assets. A pa

Because you can't hit pause on your liabilities. Double entry bookkeeping doesn't give a care about your virus. Your liabilities are someone else's assets. A pause in business activity on the scale we're seeing causes a chain reaction. The restaurant can't pause rent or loans (and even if they could, that just causes other downstream effects for bank balance sheets who can no longer loan out as much because their reserves are tapped, etc), or pause utilities, and when the restaurant ceases to purchase food and equipment that causes downstream effects on distributors and suppliers who have to tighten their belt which affects their creditors, employees, and suppliers, which affects everything else. Many restaurants lease or rent their equipment. There are huge capital costs to starting a restaurant. Businesses often operate on the margins, especially restaurants. They have to pull a lot of volume in order to make it selling food at $10-20 a plate. They maybe have 3% net profit margins, so they need to sell millions of dollars worth of food to make a decent income for the owners.