Neither side of the aisle is going to want the economy to die, no one wants that to happen, but the parties have a bit of a different take on how they want to go about things and that's okay.
One would think this, but let's be honest. It's in the interest of Democrats for the economy to crash before the reelection. Bill Maher said it would be worth it to see the economy crash if it meant Trump would lose 2020.
I think that at the end of the day we should follow scientific metrics in how we're going to open the country -- as a country we should follow something like NY in how we're going to open -
https://forward.ny.gov/regional-monitoring-dashboard - take a look here and this will show you.
NY (and I think NJ too) is following a metric based system in how they're going to open different parts of the state if they're able to pass different metrics that experts have agreed on.
I read through the metrics and I think it's being overly cautious. I'm one to advocate to being on the side of caution but one of the more stricter proposals is a decline in the 3 day average of deaths and fewer than 2 hospitalizations per 100k population. I'm not sure a city like NY can sustain numbers like these after reopening meaning that prolonged lock down looks to be the future. Reopening the economy means there's going to be an increase in cases, increase in hospitalizations, and deaths. But with social distancing in place I don't think it's enough to overwhelm the healthcare system.
This seems to be the case with Georgia -
https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report*Disclaimer about Georgia - There were reports that the state were not properly counting coronavirus cases and under reporting them. Not sure how accurate the numbers are but I don't think a few unreported cases means you need to reject the data entirely.