Remember the whole point of shutdowns was to "flatten the curve" to keep the hospitals from being overrun. We can't stop the disease and we can't commit economic suicide.
Yes, the shutdowns failed miserably if we thought we were going to eradicate infections.
The government failed badly at communicating this.
So now you have half the people saying the shutdowns were useless (cause the virus still exists) and another half saying they have to continue (cause the virus still exists, also)!
If we had realistically wanted to squash this thing, the examples of other countries suggest we would've needed much more aggressive tracing and isolating of people, widespread early mask distribution and wearing, and more tracking.
I fear that the government also may have failed miserably at taking advantage of them to bring more capacity online. Maybe the minimum stuff like masks and clothes and ventilators are taken care of, but we still seem in a very precarious place.
Voluntary changes in behavior persist, though, which will make things very hard to untangle "effect of shutdown" from "effect of people being cautious about high-risk environments."
Can you define what you mean by saying other countries squashed the thing? They may have flattened the curve, drove numbers down, etc. but until they get either a herd immunity or a wide vaccination the infections will likely flare up again as soon as travel restrictions get lifted.
Not lifting travel restrictions is not realistic unless you are talking about North Korea. If you do not lift restrictions you are also punishing your own citizens (if you let your own citizens travel they can bring back the gift that keeps giving). We will see. And quarantine where? In many countries for returning citizens it just means "please go home and try to avoid contacts for 2 weeks", which is not super effective and gets treated creatively a lot.
I see friends (US and 2 countries in Europe) who are not affected by job losses booking vacations like crazy to take advantage of low prices to visit places they always wanted. So I suspect there will be a lot of travel again in the near future.
Yeah we can't live in bubbles forever. 40 million people are unemployed in the U.S. now and counting. Millions of livelihoods are being destroyed, suicides are up, deaths for untreated non-Covid diseases are up, and if we want to avoid the complete breakdown of civilization we need to get back to work.
The government orders aren't the only thing impacting the economy.
Figuring out how to mitigate the virus, and thus making people feel more confident about economic activity, is what the economy needs.
Like good luck with it, but if 95% of Americans started wearing masks in the next couple of weeks, it's pretty clear that this would be a big boost to the economy over the next 6 months. But we don't do group oriented statistical mitigations here.
NC has only seen a slight uptick in hospitalizations: https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard and it's been flat for the past week.