Q- Is this guy really this dumb?
“We lose much more than that to automobile accidents,” Trump said. “We don't call up the automobile companies and say stop making cars. We have to get back to work.”
A - The unfortunate answer is yes, which incidentally is also the appeal to white grievance low information voters

You miss the point. We do make a trade off between cost to society and human life. The idea that you can't put a price on human life is just a trite platitude. We do it all the time. If we wanted, we could make cars virtually 100% safe. We limit the speed to 25 mph, built like a tank and padded up so that you can run into a concrete pillar and not even spill your coffee. Millions of lives will be saved every year. But the cost to society is not worth it. We are trying to find a balance of the cost to society versus how many lives can we save. The comparison to the flu is also a good analogy which Trump also used. People die by the thousands, nobody shuts anything down.
We are now aware of communicable disease than every before and take the necessary precautions. Therefore, we are much safer than ever before. No need to put our society into a depression. Poverty is also a heath care issue. The poorer you are, the poorer the country, the worse the heath care is, the higher the disease and mortality rate.