The fundamental problem is that there are two separate but related questions here, and we are conflating them:
1. How bad is the disease? I.e., how easily does it spread, what are the health impacts (short-term and long-term), who is most likely to suffer long-term or permanent consequences?
And:
2. What are the appropriate measures to address the disease to minimize overall impacts to health and the economy?
If we had a federal government that was leading the way and saying we're going to take these temporary measures to shut everything down, and in the interim we're going to expand our safety net to help the people affected and pull out all the stops to ramp up production of the supplies/people we need to manage this disease and find treatments/vaccines, and then we will carefully ease restrictions as our efforts put us in a place that we can manage this situation -- I'd be totally behind that.
But we don't. We have two binary positions. The people who care the most about the economy are justifying their position by spreading misinformation and flat-out lies about the disease to downplay its effects. And the people who are focusing on protecting health are implementing draconian shutdown orders, without much consideration of the long-term effect on the economy -- largely because that is the only tool they have in their arsenal, because (a) our federal government is controlled by people in the first category who spent months downplaying everything and refusing to take action, so that now that we are being forced to act, we need drastic action to even hope to slow things down, and (b) all of the helpful proactive things that we'd really like to do to prepare to manage the disease -- like temporarily easing rules that restrict the ability to develop tests or possible medications, forcing existing manufacturing to convert to useful stuff to the extent possible, providing access to the national stockpile of ventilators, etc. -- are exclusively within the power of the federal government, which, as noted, continues to be controlled by the "denial" faction.
Thus, because of our persistent focus on politics as usual and personal benefit over the national good, we now find ourselves having spent several months in full awareness that this thing was coming, yet having taken absolutely no useful steps to prepare our medical system to manage it. So we have found ourselves in the worst of all possible worlds: the only way to even try to flatten the curve requires draconian orders at the state and local level -- orders that are too limited and too late to actually stop anything but will definitely hurt the economy; and yet still no improvement in our ability to manage the number of people that all available data suggest will require significant medical intervention to survive and continued partisan bickering that is literally preventing the distribution of ventilators to areas that need them right now in order to prevent people from dying.
Not that I'm at all angry about this or anything.