“If I signed it today, more than 700,000 people would get up and go to work tomorrow,” he said, adding another 100,000 would be suddenly unemployed.

The different approaches have created a rift between states, angering other governors and residents living under stricter orders just across state lines. A Tennessee congressman wrote the governor of Arkansas asking for a stay-at-home order so that the virus did not spread next door.

“What are you waiting for?” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who issued the first statewide order last month, told CNN when asked about governors who have not followed suit. “What more evidence do you need? If you think it’s not going to happen to you, there are many proof points all across this country.”

People demanding tougher measures are barraging elected officials with phone calls and social-media messages.

A doctor in Iowa and a registered nurse in South Dakota have started online petitions. In Nebraska, the Facebook page of Gov. Pete Ricketts is filled with commenters second-guessing his decision. “PLEASE issue a stay at home order!” one person wrote. “Very soon it is going to be too late!!”

“We’ve got people begging us,” said Rod Sullivan, the chair of the board of supervisors in Johnson County, Iowa, who said he had gotten calls at home and on his cellphone asking why he had not done more to keep people at home. Under state law, he said, such an order must come from the governor.

“It’s hard to just tell them there’s nothing we can do,” he said.

Many residents said they were taking precautions and social distancing anyway, organizing virtual Bingo games, taking children on “bear hunts” to see teddy bears positioned outside homes or in windows in the neighborhood and organizing car cruise nights, where residents pile in their cars and drive the local strip, waving at each other from a safe distance.