Agreed. Whats so hard to understand about laws applied uniformly? We can complain that there's no avenue for fast reopening of low risk non-essentials, but to complain that policy failure means the policy is "not evidence based" is myopic.
But that ignores the actual process of policymaking: imagine a program that consists of thousands of lines of nested if-else statements, that gets a hundred PRs per day from devs implementing requirements from a dozen different PMs who aren't even necessarily communicating with each other or that knowledgeable about the actual product requirements, who also might be getting bribes to put in buggy code that happen to favor certain actors.
Optimistically, even given all that you might be able to build a policy that generates more efficiencies than a whitelist of a couple sectors. Even if you can, though, you won't be able to effectively communicate the why of any particular decision to the public. So they get pissed off when you allow people to go to the beach on a sunny day to pop open a bottle of beer while you disallow in-person religious services.
The law was applied arbitrarily from the beginning of the lockdown. There was never uniformity, and the decisions about which businesses are essential was arbitrary rather evidence-based. In what rational world is a marijuana dispensary considered more essential than a car factory?
The one they already have. How were they buying groceries and making deliveries before the pandemic? I understand where you are going with this, but that's not a good faith argument for keeping car factories open.
In short, I understand the anger. I even understand the guy, who did not want to wear a mask out of spite at my wife's place ( more specifically, he did not want to wear it, because eff IL state government; he put it on when he was told it was office policy.. ). But it is getting messy and we better figure it out quick, before that powder cake gets lit.
The opportunity to contain it has passed and now we really need to think hard what to do next, because options are not great.
As for what now... unfortunately I don't think there's a good way out for the USA. Other highly developed countries have established a tenuous path toward controlling the virus (in different ways), but Americans seems intent on running headfirst into the abattoir.
There are few times to accept government restrictions, but I would say pandemic qualifies. Hell, I was almost ready to accept Trump's flimsy characterization of the pandemic as war with invisible enemy since I was half hoping he would impose stringent restrictions. But he chickened out. And now we have this wishy washy, no mans land, not quite quarantine re-opening.
To say that it is a cluster fuck is an understatement.
1) COVID-19 is a BFD
2) The PRC, in culture and governance, is exceptionally well-equipped to handle disasters of this type
3) The USA, in culture and governance, is exceptionally badly-equipped to make this pandemic unfold as anything except a giant clusterfuck
Those seem to have held up pretty well.