The Pennsylvania economy is a butterfly in a jar, held in place but still fluttering.

The jar is the shutdown ordered by Gov. Tom Wolf in response to the coronavirus pandemic. They’re an effort to mitigate the risk to human life posed by a disease that the latest federal estimates say could kill as many as 250,000 nationwide even with restrictions — and millions without them.

The fluttering? That’s the pieces of the economy still working. People can stay home, but they still need to eat. People still need their medicine. The medical workers need to take care of the sick. And all of them need gas for their cars or buses to get to work or a takeout burger on their lunch breaks.

There are those worried about the butterfly suffocating in the jar. It’s not a misplaced fear. For every day businesses are closed, the harder it could be to open up again.

But while this particular situation is unprecedented, it’s not the first time things have gotten bad, and it probably won’t be the last.

The economy wants to survive, and the economy isn’t just made up of numbers. It isn’t dollars and cents and stocks and futures. It’s people. And while people are the disease-carrying problem, they are also the cure.

Because people are the creative engine that power the economy, and they are also the navigation system that steers it. And no matter what roadblocks are thrown in front of it, the economy tends to swerve.

When Prohibition shuttered alcohol-related businesses, some of them closed. Others found ways to keep the doors open — making ice or churning ice cream, finding new ways to sell glass for bottles or wood for barrels.

The H.J. Heinz Co. was born in 1869, smack in the center of a cholera pandemic. Carnegie Steel was started in 1892. There was a recession that year. It became one of the building blocks of U.S. Steel in 1901. There was a stock market crash that year.

Kennywood opened as the country pulled out of a depression in 1898. Primanti’s was founded in 1933 during the heart of the Great Depression. Around the same time, Isaly’s turned the “pressed ham” no one wanted into the “chipped chopped ham” everyone loves by changing how it was sliced.

The BetRivers.com online sportsbook operating with Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino probably never envisioned a time that the City of Champions would have no sports happening. But they didn’t close down their operations. They found a way around it. Hey, who knows? Maybe Russian pingpong will actually become something people follow after the pandemic.

Companies are finding ways to do business online. They are finding ways to do business with delivery. They are finding ways to keep the staff employed by converting to making hand sanitizer or ventilators or other in-demand products, rather than closing the doors.

The economy might be in a jar right now, but with enough support and enough creativity, that butterfly can still take off when it’s let free.

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