You really have zero idea of what actually happened, do you? We didn't even get a chance to try any interventions, since we were so woefully unprepared because of not having any testing to know we were in the midst of the worst outbreak this planet has seen so far. If we had been testing like other countries, we might've known we had 25K cases by early March in NYC Metro - instead we had run zero tests by then and the virus was growing exponentially, because this area received, by far, the most infected people from abroad (from Europe) and this area has the highest population density and mass transit density, fueling the explosive growth, unknown to everyone.
If we had been testing and had proactively put a tracing/isolating infrastructure in place like several other countries, we would've greatly reduced the cases/deaths. Alternatively, even if we had only been aggressively testing, we would've known the explosive growth and could've shut down ~2 weeks earlier, saving 75-90% of our deaths. But we had nothing in place, despite having written the "pandemic playbook" that South Korea, Taiwan and others followed so well, so really all we could do was shut everything down and it then took 4-6 weeks for the shutdowns to "flatten the curve," aided by social distancing and masks a bit, although masks weren't even recommended until early April by CDC.
And while we've had the most cases/deaths, the very late shutdowns were effective eventually and did largely protect the hospitals, which was the first priority. We also would've had 3-4X as many cases/deaths if we didn't shut down and start practicing distancing/mask-wearing. But if we had taken the approach of several other countries and followed our own playbook, yes, we could've kept cases and deaths far, far below what they were (if we had the deaths per capita of SK, China, Taiwan, Japan, etc., we'd only have 1000-2000 deaths). And guess what - if we had controlled cases even half that well, we would have had no hospital issues at all.
Last point: it will never be fair to compare what happened in the DC-Boston corridor with anything that's happening recently to now, since all the other states got to learn from our mistakes - and even with that, some are still not learning and that's sad. They're unlikely to reach exponential growth because they at least learned the lesson of testing, so that they're not flying blind and will certainly ratchet up interventions in some way (closures/mandatory masks/etc.) should case rates really start to climb. But even a slow, steady burn will have illnesses and deaths pile up over time and it's sad that some will accept that when we could do so much better.
