Well, here is the deal: this virus jumped from animals to humans a few months ago and while our best scientists are working feverishly on this, we still don’t know.
It is highly contagious and is lethal to a small but significant percentage of our population, and it will put many into the hospital, thereby overwhelming our capacity.
So we need to “flatten the curve” in the sense that we can’t have too many sick at one time, and we need to keep the most vulnerable from getting it at all.
And we need to buy time to see what mix of vaccines and social policy (such as the test, quarantine and trace that Korea used) will make our society reasonably safe again.
So, yes, there are probably things we are doing right now that constitute an overreaction. But..we don’t know which things are essential and which are unnecessary so we need to do them all (following then principals of slowing a pandemic) until our scientists and public health officials can figure out a smart strategy, appropriate for the conditions AT THAT TIME.
And those might mean the “hammer and dance.”
Life of an old goat 