Depressing.
If you want to argue that manufacturing can be open safely fine, and it's also fine to sue the county to force their hand.
But coronavirus restrictions save lives (stuff like mask wearing) and tweeting crap like "FREE AMERICA NOW" is extremely unhelpful. We should be arguing about the exact way in which government intervention can be used to reduce the spread.
Replace pandemic with war. What's the difference? Governments readily encroach on civil liberties during emergencies. And we know how advocates of the Patriot Act recognized it would be a powerful law, so they said it would be temporary. We all know how that turned out. It doesn't seem like it'll go away now.
I fear we'll play out something similar with lockdown. And what's really somewhat horrifying is that the mere mention of concerns surrounding lockdown is made out to be crazy, dangerous, inhumane, etc.
Imminent invasions also justify emergency powers, but not overseas wars.
My guess is that the pandemic will be completely under control before a year has passed.
That's what's behind a lot of the consternation over government responses. A lot of lives are at stake, and not just those which might be taken by COVID.
This personal opinion is not echoed by many people who feel that the government has overreached. They feel that if a person wants total government control of their safety, that person can move to a country like China.
That being said, I got more sympathy when I learned how absolutely absurd Gavin Newsom's reopening conditions were - halt reopening of a county until "No more than one new COVID-19 case per 10,000 residents in the past 14 days" and "No COVID-19 deaths in the past 14 days".
It seems much more logical to base it on the R-number (number of people infected on average by each infected person), like we do here in Norway. The more the R-number goes down, the more things can be reopened.
The problem with basing it off R number is we can only estimate R0, which is why most reopening criteria are based around deaths and tests per capita.
However, new case counts and new deaths matter a lot. Even with, say, R=0.8, with a big outbreak, people will continue to get sick and die. It also means that if you underestimate the effect of opening up and wind up with R>1, you can start running into capacity problems, either contact tracing, testing, or hospital capacity. It's best to get case counts low and declining, and then start opening things up.
The problem is: merely checking those measures for every business is going to be a lot of work.
Elon might be right, just like he was right about his cpap machines instead of full ventilators.
He made some very specific, very incorrect predictions: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960