If the last several weeks have taught us anything, it’s that the coronavirus has laid bare a true crisis in leadership.

Out of a sense of duty, business owners and citizens shut down the world’s strongest economy to protect everyone against the real threat of COVID-19 – an illness that still confounds researchers as positive cases and deaths rise.

Weeks went by, then a month. As each hour passes, our economy deteriorates under arbitrary and contradictory guidelines that change from one city to the next. The patchwork of shelter-in-place guidance – from federal, state to local government – has grown utterly confusing. Each agency has had a chance to fine tune its rules in the six weeks since this all started. It’s time for real leadership to step up and get us all on the same page. It’s time to focus on turning the ship.

We have dual enemies now – coronavirus and uncertainty. Uncertainty has always been a killer of business confidence. It’s much worse when you don’t have the revenue you are used to. A lot of “non-essential” businesses in Fresno closed on March 19 when the first shelter-in-place took effect. Many of them won’t reopen.

Take Fresno-based Full Circle Olympic, a Tower District “dive bar” in the best sense of the word. The building had been vacant for a few years before Full Circle Brewing Co. revived it in January 2019. Its owners announced its permanent closure effective May 1, in part due to uncertainty on when nightlife would return.

There were economic winners and losers when this pandemic started. It wasn’t part of some devious scheme, but it was odd that you could go into Target and buy clothes while local boutiques were ordered closed. Why you could go onto a Clovis auto lot to buy a car, but couldn’t do the same in Fresno. Why you could do curbside pickup at Walmart but not from a local furniture store. Why you could play golf at a course in Fresno County, but not in the City of Fresno.

At this point, state and county leaders would be best served to stay out of the way and let business owners and citizens again take the lead in reopening the economy in the safest way we can. By all indications, we have entered a deep recession. Each day of indecision and contradiction puts our economy farther in a hole.

First, business owners must recognize there is a new normal. It involves spacing out employees and customers, workers wearing masks and other personal protective equipment, constant disinfecting and learning to adapt their business model to this new era of social distancing.

Consumers must also do their part. People with compromised immune systems should continue to keep their distance. Healthy people must continue to help them do so. We should wear masks in public, make hand washing a ritual and limit high-risk contact with others.

Coronavirus is here to stay. We can hope for a vaccine, but there is no guarantee one will come any time soon. Our elected (and unelected) leadership guided us as far as it could in this pandemic, but now it’s time for business owners and consumers to take the lead and resume commerce in the safest way possible. As each day passes, the cure (lockdown) truly grows worse than the disease of COVID-19 if we want to emerge from this crisis on our feet.

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Gabriel Dillard is the managing editor of The Business Journal.