"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Benjamin Franklin

There is something called the "police power of the state" - which means that government has a legitimate role in protecting people. (That's why we have zoning, BTW, SCOTUS rut a police power of the state back in the 1920s). The preamble to the Constitution does talk about "promoting the general welfare." It there was ever a time to do that, it's now.

Can Lee et al falsify the need to socially distance? If so, how? If not, then the science holds. But it’s not about the science, it’s about anti-intellectual dispositions that have and will continue to get ppl killed because Lee et al are in a bubble that doesn’t allow for objective reality to greatly influence their policies. It’s the reason why his policies are late and weak, it’s the reason why Desantis is sacrificing Floridians, it’s the reason why Mayor Jacobs won’t enforce his own social distancing policy sayng compliance is voluntary and it’s the reason why a pastor got arrested for setting off biological bombs. It's the reason why Southern conservative Governors will have blood on their hands - because ideologically they are constitutionally unable to listen to, give priority science.

Instead, their overt concept is that people must die for the economy while sacrificing their safety. It’s been years in the making.

How did we get to the point where ministers, the president, many Republican politicians, and a variety of media outlets are calling for people to risk death to save the economy? This rhetoric has a long history. It grew out of the backlash to the New Deal and the social safety net it created, which conservatives viewed as anti-American, anti-capitalist, and emasculating—a challenge to what the historian Richard Hofstadter once called “the virile prerogatives of enterprise.” But just as few people today believe New Deal liberalism unmanned the country, future generations are unlikely to look back favorably on the campaign against social distancing.

Lee: "I think we made the right decision. There's very little evidence about shelter-in-place orders working."

Lee: "There are some in the medical community that don't think we've gone far enough. There are others in the medical community that are very supportive of the efforts we've taken so far. There are a lot of views and they vary widely."

Another example would Georgia's Gov. Kemp, who had the audacity to say yesterday, after weeks of reporting on this enormous public health crisis, that he just found out that the virus is spread asymptomatically. Are we supposed to take at face value that the executive of Georgia "just found out" that the virus spreads asymptomatically? Or, given the party's ideology and track record, he didn't know about it because
- his decision tree is bare of expertise,
- has expertise but not listened to
- has expertise but dismissed it like Trump?

"Finding out that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs, so what we've been telling people from directives from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] for weeks now that if you start feeling bad, stay home ... those individuals could've been infecting people before they ever felt bad,” he added. “But we didn't know that until the last 24 hours. And as Dr. Toomey told me, this is a game changer for us."

This weak, tepid, tardily informed response is weeks too late and people in Georgia will die because of it.