[CydeWeys]

Social distancing was always going to happen. Restaurants here in NYC were running at one quarter their normal business in the days leading up to the official lockdown. People aren't stupid, and will choose to stay home when a pandemic is ravaging their community regardless of what official guidance might be.

There's no world in which the pandemic is running unchecked through society and people are acting like everything is fine and normal and doing all the usual stuff they're accustomed to.

This is a conflation of what the virus itself has down, and the response to it.

[jfnixon]

Not at all. Hospitals shut down elective procedures, not because they were running out of room, but because they were ordered to do so. That freed capacity may have been necessary in NYC, and maybe not, but nowhere else was it necessary.