In hopes of stimulating a discussion about a plan, Dr. David Katz, a public health expert, I and others last weekend helped to spark a debate about how we best maximize our nation’s two necessities: that is, limiting the number of infections and deaths from the coronavirus, and simultaneously maximizing the speed at which we can safely fold workers back into the workplace, based on the best data and expert advice.

That is a plan for what Katz called “total harm minimization,” because while people can die from the virus, they can also die from depression, anxiety and addictions that flow from having their jobs, savings and futures crushed by an economy in permanent lockdown.

As Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in The Washington Post on Wednesday: “The choice is not between health and economics but about optimizing the public health response to save lives while minimizing economic harm.”

In all honesty, though, sir, you immediately and crudely jumped into that discussion with a tweet last Sunday night — “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF” — that polarized and caricatured the whole debate. Your critics accused you of only caring about the stock market, not human lives. Meanwhile your supporters accused your critics of moral preening and ignoring how many people would die from a deep and prolonged economic depression.

We must do better. To be sure, we need an immediate all-out push by states and the federal government to get hospitals the equipment they need to deal with a surge of coronavirus patients, an effort that is at long last underway. But beyond that, you need to articulate the three-step plan that is out there and is yours for the taking.

Step 1: First, you need to call for a 50-state sheltering-in-place/social-distancing program. While the experts differ on how long that national lockdown should be — two weeks, four weeks, eight weeks, whatever the C.D.C. recommends, I say — they virtually all agree that it is needed to manifestly slow the spread of the coronavirus, to prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed and to buy us the critical time we need to collect the data required to inform all future decision-making.

As the public health expert Ezekiel Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in this newspaper on Monday, you need to “immediately order the closing of all schools and nonessential businesses and impose a shelter-in-place policy for the entire country. The majority of the population is already experiencing some version of this protocol or feeling the effects economically; we need to standardize these protocols for the full public health impact.”