To be fair, in order to risk your life on the road, we mitigate those risks with rules, and we have an expectation that people will follow them.
You may be less willing to risk your life on a cross-town drive if speed limits were suggestions, and stop lights were optional, and a non-0 percentage of people died on the route every day.
If we, as a country, can just buckle down and do the hard stuff for a few weeks - masks, social distancing, testing, tracing we could look more like Europe, and less like a third-world country. And, its the entire country at risk - not just the current hot spots. We have to do the hard stuff even in areas with very few current cases - that is how you keep the spread from reaching those areas.