This story has been repeated a lot but (I am pretty sure) doesn't make sense. It's true that the difference between good health care and totally overloaded hos

This story has been repeated a lot but (I am pretty sure) doesn't make sense. It's true that the difference between good health care and totally overloaded hospitals could be a factor of two or more in the CFR. But the difference between hospitals overloaded by a factor of ten and hospitals overloaded by a factor of twenty isn't. If this disease has hospitalization, critical care, and death rates as high as it appears to (these rates are really hard to measure in the middle of a fast growing epidemic with inadequate testing and lots of variable lags, but we have e.g. Diamond Princess and South Korea to extrapolate from) and it is allowed to infect almost everyone, "bending the curve" until hospital capacity is not utterly overwhelmed would take years and years. And require lockdown after lockdown after lockdown to keep the case count down. If it's worth huge sacrifices to reduce R, it has to be to reduce it to less than 1, shrink the epidemic to a manageable size, and then implement a massive testing and tracing operation which in combination with hygeine (masks!) and less costly social distancing (and eventually vaccines) hold R below 1 forever. Asian countries appear to have succeeded with this approach, so there is reason to think it isn't impossible. But without that follow up, or without reaching R<1, lockdowns can only delay the inevitable and will save a negligible number of lives.