Yeah, the economy is in a dreadful position but the alternative is a living nightmare that is worse. Also, how good is the economy going to be when we have a quarter Million or more deaths and several Million infections?
Yeah.
People aren't going to return to work in droves and return to stores in droves if they either are dead or afraid of contracting the virus, if not for themselves, at least for the risk of passing it on to someone else. Being a warrior for the economy isn't a lot of solace if you wind up on a ventilator for a week or infected Grandma.
That's part of this that was botched from the start, IMO. We never had that "the only thing to fear is fear itself" or "ask what you can do for your country" moment. The most resounding messages from a month of two-hour-long press conferences was "You know why I can do that? Because I'm the president and I have absolute authority" and "That's a nasty question." That and all these mixed messages and contradictions and constantly driving over your own towline.
In a desperate situation, as a leader, you need to find a way to make people feel you are empathetic with them. You need to make strong decisions and stick to them unless it is obvious after more info comes in that a change of course is necessitated. You have to appear that you are in command of the situation. If you get sidetracked, talk vaguely, don't seem to have a plan. and can't get your message across, how do you expect people to feel it's worth their while to go out more than they absolutely have to?
You can't say tests are available to everyone when they provably aren't. You can't tell people to wear masks and then not wear one yourself -- especially when you are part of the most at-risk demographic.
I think the federal government needed to push for a shutdown like the one we had, but across the board, earlier. It needed to make testing a priority and it had to grant protections for individuals and small businesses. If that had happened, I feel strongly we were looking at rebooting our economy by the middle of this month and that people would feel more comfortable in returning to routine.
All the mixed messages did was confuse people, create an everyone-for-themself mentality, and potentially set in motion a situation where we're going to have another partial shutdown that's just going to make it harder to bring the economy back.