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Maybe they assume everybody already knows that allowing lots of people to die is bad for the economy. Not to mention the perception of bad leadership.

• Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > everybody already knows that allowing lots of people to die is bad for the economy We now know that half of all European deaths have been in care homes. The elderly in care homes are not significant contributors to the economy. (And over in resource-extraction states, most of the population is often regarded by local thinktanks as "superfluous" – Russia, for example, only needs about 10 million people to run its economy, and it makes little difference whether the virus affects the other ~135 million people!) Of course, there is a need to flatten the curve so that the virus doesn't begin to affect, by overloading the healthcare system, those demographics that are major drivers of the economy. You also don't want people to be scared of going out and consuming. However, if the curve can still be flattened sufficiently with businesses open, then there is little mandate to call for keeping them closed just to protect that aforementioned elderly demographic.