As a server at a busy restaurant, I come in contact with dozens of customers in an average shift. I handle hundreds of dirty plates, glasses, and utensils with my bare hands—all of which have touched customers’ mouths. Contracting Covid-19 could be as easy as taking the wrong person’s fork back to the dish room.

The restaurant itself—an Irish pub—was closed the day before St. Patrick’s Day due to an emergency declaration from the state. I was effectively laid off at the end of my shift that night. Since then, I’ve been self-quarantining, waiting out the pandemic, and waiting for help that has yet to arrive, either from the state unemployment office or from the federal government. My only source of income now is writing, which I can thankfully do as long as I keep paying my internet bill.

For anyone who thinks I should go back to work, I ask: Is potentially infecting me, and the loved ones and strangers I might pass it on to, worth perking up the S&P 500?

President Donald Trump is understandably concerned about the economy. The Dow Jones recently fell below levels at the start of his administration. The president of the St. Louis Fed has predicted unemployment could skyrocket to as much as 30% next month. Peak unemployment in 1933, during the Great Depression, was 24.9%. That seems plausible: More than 3 million people filed for unemployment last week.

It’s bad out there. But when the president says we can’t let the cure to the coronavirus “be worse than the problem itself,” and when ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein suggests we should soon “let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work,” I feel like my life matters less than the value of their stock portfolios.

Like 34% of Americans, I have no savings at all. Like 7,800 other journalists in 2019, I lost my full-time job last year when declining ad revenue forced the digital publication I worked at for two years to shut down. (Thanks, Google and Facebook.) Since then, I’ve been waiting tables to make ends meet.

A one-time $1,200 check from the federal government, the current offering from the Senate, would barely cover my rent, leaving almost nothing for groceries, utilities, my phone bill, my car note, and other monthly obligations I’m still expected to meet.

My situation is not unique. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition found the national average fair-market rent is $1,194 a month for a two-bedroom apartment and $970 for a one-bedroom. That leaves most working-class Americans with little or nothing for other necessities after they get their $1,200. And that’s assuming it comes soon—Americans who don’t have direct deposit information on file with the IRS from prior tax returns may wait as long as four months to get their check.

I’m also one of the 27.5 million Americans who don’t have health insurance. If I get sick, I can’t afford to see a doctor. The cost of my treatment could be as high as $35,000. My only strategy is to eat healthy, drink plenty of water, get daily exercise, and sleep for eight hours a day.

And health insurance or no, I probably couldn’t even get tested given the lack of available Covid-19 testing kits in the United States. A physician’s order might help, but it’s tough to get a referral when you can’t afford to visit the doctor. While VIPs like Sen. Rand Paul get tested even without showing symptoms, ordinary working-class Americans, like a hospital worker in Vermont who was directly exposed to someone showing symptoms, get stiff-armed when seeking a test. The inequality in testing is even more infuriating when considering the Trump administration declined testing kits the World Health Organization shipped to 60 other countries earlier this year.

The indifference I feel from top officials and leading conservatives is off the chart. National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow recently told Fox News, “We’re going to have to make some difficult trade-offs.” By “trade-offs” he meant the health and safety of workers versus the stability of the markets. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick went a step further, suggesting that he would be “all-in” if given the choice to “take a chance” on his own survival to preserve a healthy economy. Conservative commentator Jesse Kelly said he would “happily die” if given the choice between death and another Great Depression. Since I’m the one who actually has to make that choice, I’m certainly not opting for death. What I want from politicians is to find the will to keep the economy alive without putting me at risk.

Top doctors and health officials across the country have given unambiguous advice: An end to social distancing would mean catastrophe. “To drop all these measures now would be to accept that Covid [patients] will get sick in extraordinary numbers all over the country, far beyond what the U.S. healthcare system could bear,” warned Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

If we’re going to avoid potential widespread deaths that medical officials are warning of, the lives of working-class Americans need to be prioritized more by our elected officials. The economy is made up of flesh-and-blood human beings like me who need to be healthy and well in order to be productive. If millions of people get sick, are hospitalized, and die because we were too hasty to get back to normal, that would hurt the economy far more than a few more weeks of social distancing.

I hope Congress will pass a package similar to legislation proposed by House Financial Services Committee chair Maxine Waters that would, among other things, provide $2,000 for each adult and $1,000 for each child for each month of the crisis; suspend all consumer and small business credit payments; suspend all negative consumer credit reporting; prohibit debt-collection, wage-garnishment, and repossessions during the pandemic, and ban all evictions, foreclosures, and repossessions until we’re in the clear.

Until then, I’m staying home.

Carl Gibson is a freelance journalist whose work has been published by CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Twitter @crgibs.