Some places' ERs are already at capacity, and there's no way I would go to one right now unless I was almost at death's doorstep. That's not necessarily a good thing if something happens that should normally require an ER visit.
Interestingly enough, questioning the health of that particular institution is much more taboo than most in this crisis. Given the practical importance of patient faith in the healthcare provider that may be reasonable, but for my money I'd like to be able to try and imagine a better healthcare system in a public forum without getting downvoted for criticizing its current incarnation.
You start rapidly building additional capacity to handle the load.
It won't be permanent. It will be like a forest fire and kill a lot of people and be horrible, but will eventually die down due to heard immunity.
You don't want people dying needlessly for half a year.
And while the overload is on, the economy will be affected, whatever the response is.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/health/doctors-coronavirus-he...
That is what would happen if you just let the thing pass. Those charts of "squashing the sombrero" have the number of beds at a very low place compared to the expected hump of cases. On some of them you can barely even see the gap between the red line and the zero line, due to the scale of the hump.
Death rates would shoot up way above what is normal for the disease, people would die of all sorts of other preventable things too.