Two weeks, no Lowes, no McDonalds, no grocery stores, no amazon delivery drivers, no postal service, no pharmacy. Only emergency room/icu, fire fighters, emts, cops, and powerplant operators.
Instead we put everyone on house arrest for an indefinite period of time.
In my deep red corner of the woods there's different cars in front of each house seemingly every other day and music, too. That's what you do in the face of the plague, you party!
Where I worked a transitioned to WFH for about 98% of the employees, but so many were still stopping by the office that the employees who couldn't work from home and felt they were at increased risk eventually contacted upper management and now every visit to the office is recorded and a manager has to provide a justification for why that employee had to be on site.
I think we have to look at little deeper into the America psyche to see what is driving this.
(As for where I live, the 2016 vote was almost a 50/50 split in the surrounding area.)
Instead, here we are. Almost at the two-month mark. And infection rates where I live (NOVA) are even higher than a month ago. FML.
It seems lockdowns cannot be implemented successfully no matter what you do. Perhaps a simple public mask requirement would have been better.
And even then, the odds of successful containment are pretty low.
We can decide to take the loss and let most people get infected, or we can be super aggressive about lockdown and contain it. Instead, we seem to have a compromise which is seems to take the loss, but slower with a porous lockdown which will have to last indefinitely. Now the other worlds are imagined in my head, so this may not be the case, but it is hard to look at e.g. New Zealand and not be frustrated by America's response.
p.s. I don't think Americans collectively decided anything about what options we would use to combat the virus. The federal executive branch effectively decided to do nothing, or nothing coherent and consistent, and states have individually scrambled to come up with their own responses, with varying levels of effectiveness.