I’m not sure what specifics you’re asking for? There were lockdowns for 2 weeks. Any customer facing business that couldn’t have customers walking in to do bus

I’m not sure what specifics you’re asking for? There were lockdowns for 2 weeks. Any customer facing business that couldn’t have customers walking in to do business was going to have no income for at least that long. If you don’t have income, there’s no money for expenses like payroll. Unless you operate an extremely high margin business, your only options are to not pay staff during that time or to have layoffs. Most small businesses aren’t high margin. As for middlemen, given the short timeline what were the real options for the government? Setup a channel where every individual could apply for direct relief or use existing heavily regulated channels through banks? Keeping the economy moving needed to be the top priority, so existing channels made more sense. We applied for a loan at our small business. We worked with our accountant and banker to make sure everything was handled properly and then documented everything so that we could apply for forgiveness. We didn’t have any issue since our staff had grown by a couple of positions from the prior year. Even though revenues did take a hit, the temporary allowance for telepractice options helped to lessen the overall impact. If not for the PPP loans our business and a lot of others like it would have been staring down bankruptcy and layoffs for about 30 people. And we run a tight margin business. I can’t say that there wasn’t fraud in some places, but for us it worked exactly as intended. The combination of PPP with high unemployment payments that lasted much longer than needed pretty well spread things around. Both of them had an impact on the overall economy. In hindsight, we probably would have been best off by just having people take precautions and avoid lockdowns entirely. Hopefully we will learn from the mistake.