A Republican congressman from Indiana has told an interviewer that opening up the American economy in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic would be “the lesser of two evils”.

Trey Hollingsworth, who has represented the state’s ninth congressional district since 2017, was asked by WIBC radio host Tony Katz whether the federal government’s response to the pandemic was the right one — specifically its instruction to Americans that staying at home is necessary to stop the virus in his tracks.

His response was that the government’s focus on saving American lives was misguided, given the harm that social distancing measures are doing to the economy.

“It is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter. And this is what I push back on, by these people who say ‘science should govern all of this’.

“Certainly science is telling us where this disease will progress, and how it will progress over time. Certainly the social scientists are telling us about the economic disaster that is occurring, down 20 per cent this quarter alone our GDP is expected to be.

“It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big-boy or big-girl pants and say: ‘this is the lesser of two evils, and it is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these evils and we intend to move forward in that direction. That is our responsibility, and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.’”

Mr Hollingsworth is not alone in arguing that the economy should come first. Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said earlier in the pandemic that American senior citizens should accept the likelihood that some of them would die in order to allow the economy to re-open and preserve “the America that all America loves” for their children and grandchildren.

The coronavirus pandemic and the drastic measures to halt it have indeed hit the US’s economy hard, with unemployment exploding and GDP expected to shrink dramatically in the next quarter. However, many have argued that that number will look far worse than it is in reality thanks to the US government’s reporting methods.

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he intends to lift the shutdown as soon as possible, though his original plan to do so by Easter fell by the wayside after experts warned that doing so could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of lives. He apparently now wants it lifted on 1 May.

Meanwhile, several states — including California and New York — are co-ordinating regional plans to start lifting their own social distancing measures. However, they intend to do so cautiously. While New York governor Andrew Cuomo recently declared that “the worst is over” if New Yorkers “continue to be smart”, he also said that “you can turn those numbers on two or three days of reckless behaviour”.

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Elsewhere in his interview, Mr Hollingsworth accused China of “hiding the virus” to an extent that led to “hugely deleterious consequences for Hoosiers here at home” — and called for punitive action.

“You first figure out how to solve the problem that stands before us — how do we get Americans back to work, how do we get people back engaged in their lives again — and then secondarily you find out who’s responsible for that and you go after who’s responsible for that.”