Sure, maybe, and we could spin out dozens of scenarios and approaches that could have been better or worse. I think one phrase from your comment highlights the

Sure, maybe, and we could spin out dozens of scenarios and approaches that could have been better or worse. I think one phrase from your comment highlights the entire problem though: “enforce no action.” You can’t enforce a society wide shutdown. You can only get that from citizens who voluntarily participate in a social order that they trust. We (Americans) are faced with enormous problems as a society as a result of our inability to trust one another. We may be able to engineer a zero trust replacement for our monetary system. We seem to desire the same thing for our society. Everyone demands infinite verification of everything. Fact check the fact checkers and audit the auditors that audit the election results! At some point though, it’s turtles all the way down. Political debate is starting to sound like epistemology. It appears that societies that have greater levels of trust are faring better in this pandemic. That cannot become an excuse for our failure. It should instruct us on how to proceed. EDIT: re-reading this I realize I’m singling out “society wide shutdown” as the sort of imagined best response, maybe it is, but what I was really thinking of was “highly coordinated society wide response where everyone does what they are supposed to based on their role.”