Back in March, when the lockdown was issued in Massachusetts, just a couple of days after CA and NY, it was chaotic. People were lining up for their toilet paper, hand sanitizer, lysol chicken etc. Old people standing next to young, shelves stripped bare in the stores, people driving around from store to store and even going up to NH looking for the basics.

It was a free for all, pandemonium. It had to have been a super-spreading event in it's own right.

In May, Gov. Baker activated the Mass National Guard to help the nursing homes, there were troopers/medics going from home to home, administering COVID tests, checking vitals and, unfortunately removing bodies.

What we _should_ have done is activate the National Guard back in late January to blockade all nursing homes, hospitals etc. to make sure only approved people entered and that they were provided with some of the limited PPE we had and were using it.

Additionally, towns could have organized volunteers to deliver food, groceries and medicines to the vulnerable who were quarantining at home.

So yes, some focus and we could probably have cut the death rate by 80% in MA.

I think this is misunderstanding the point. It's not that we can't protect the most vulnerable, it's that we can't protect them particularly well IF community spread is high.

We are partially effective in protecting the most vulnerable, e.g. through restrictions on nursing homes. But, infections in these communities still correlate with the level of community spread - e.g. if you halve the new case rate in nursing homes with restrictions, but you double the new case rate in the community, you may be back to where you started.

The point being, as you allow significantly more spread in lower risk populations, you'll have a really hard time keeping higher risk groups at their current level of transmission risk (which, in the US, is already a fairly high level of transmission risk).