It could. Or it could be simply getting out of control (though specifically California is in much less trouble than Texas, Florida or especially Arizona at the moment). The point is that (1) it's fundamentally impossible to tell the difference until the bodies are counted and (2) the boundary between "well under capacity, we're fine" and "well over capacity, tens of thousands needlessly dead" represents just a week or two of growth.

We don't have time to wait and see, we need an answer now. And we can't get it until the demographics is done postmortem. So what is supposed to happen is that we all behave conservatively until the outbreak shrinks to the point where it can be contained via contact tracing.

And... that almost worked. It worked in Asia and Europe, It almost worked here, at least in the hardest hit areas with the early outbreaks. But... it didn't take. Half the population decided they didn't need to bother with this stuff (largely because of reasoning like yours) and walked back into enclosed indoor spaces.

And now we're right back where we were in March. Effectively no progress. While the rest of the industrialized world is finishing this off and coming back to life, we're having to talk about new lockdowns. It's so deeply frustrating.