It's by no means a "hope and pray it goes away" or a "lets wait it out until a vaccine" -- it's a "let's get everyone not in a risk category infected as fast as possible so long as the healthcare system retains some excess capacity."
> healthcare facilities remain un-saturated
You can't simply look at the current burden on the health care system to guide the process. The virus has a 2-3 week lag time between when an infection cluster breaks out, and when the health care system starts to feel the impact. Without wide scale testing, we are just going to end up back in a lock down once the infection numbers start climbing again. And I can't think of a worse scenario for our economy than having to shut things down every other month because our government is to incompetent to implement a tracing program that multiple countries already have up and running.
In the meantime, the coastal town that I live in is getting swarmed with out of town visitors every weekend. This is in violation of the shelter-in-place orders. Other towns have stepped up enforcement to combat this type of behavior, but our police department is small and does not have the resources. We shut down the parking lots, but now they just park in the neighborhoods. And to add insult to injury, we have a large senior housing complex at the entrance point to my neighborhood.
I have little faith that the US could achieve the type of distancing and isolation necessary on a voluntary basis. There is a sharp vein of individualism that runs through our society that works strongly against us in these types of situations.