Each new day I hear yet another call for “opening up the economy,” and my annoyance level rises.
Not because I do not want the lockdown orders removed, however. I am annoyed because “the economy” seems unexceptionable but is not. It is an extremely deceptive term. It induces people to think of a Thing that can be shut off and on like a light switch. It suggests that it’s about money and organization and is generally ancillary to our lives. But it isn’t an existent “it” in the singular, much less in a mechanistic manner, it is an emergent order of people producing and trading. “The economy” is people doing the things that allow us to live. It is, in a sense, living.
It is “making a living.” Shut it down and you make death.
When you prohibit people from commerce, from producing and exchanging, you are cutting off the life blood of the civizilization. When we worry that “the economy will suffer” we mean “people will suffer.” And some will die.
Wirkman Comment 
Even before the lock-downs, you wrote of the underlying problem of the term “the economy”; and, for my part, I often look for a less misleading expression, though sometimes the practical result of using another term would be still greater obfuscation.
Part of the still deeper issue is that, when most people hear and read of “economics”, they think of something smaller than the actual scope of economics; doing so creates a conceptual barrier that keeps them from understand both things outside the smaller scope and things within the smaller scope. Though technocratic thinkers often recognized that the way in which they think of “the economy” would be dehumanizing in application to a broader scope, they fail to realize that it is dehumanizing in application to the smaller scope.