Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick told Fox News late Monday that Americans should get “back to work,” echoing comments from President Trump earlier in the day.

“Let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it,” Patrick said on the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” program. “And those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country.”

“No one reached out to me and said, 'As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for its children and grandchildren?' And if that is the exchange, I'm all in,” Patrick continued.

Patrick is arguing that the elderly should take the risk of contracting coronavirus in exchange for reopening the U.S. economy. Multiple states, such as New York, California, Ohio, New Jersey and Illinois have issued stay-at-home orders, shutting down all non-essential businesses in order to slow down the spread of the virus.

Trump has also signaled that the U.S. should reopen the economy amid the coronavirus outbreak, as unemployment skyrockets and the stock market plummets to new lows.

“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” Trump said. “This is not a country that was built for this.”

Health experts have disagreed with Trump’s comments, as they believe that social isolation is the best method to stop the spread of the virus.

“You can’t call off the best weapon we have, which is social isolation, even out of economic desperation, unless you’re willing to be responsible for a mountain of deaths,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center told the New York Times.

Lawrence Gostin, a law professor specializing in public health at Georgetown University, told the Associated Press that if the U.S. eases social distancing measures too soon, “you will have more deaths and more dives in the stock market.”

There are at least 46,548 cases of coronavirus in the U.S., with the death toll at 613.

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