The problem is that there are people with pre-existing conditions who have issues.
I personally had a headache and no fever for two days, then lost taste and smell for over 2 weeks, and now it's slowly coming back but with weird issues (like when I ordered McDonald's for my daughters and the food smelled like rotten tomatoes when it was just fries and nuggets, or fresh corn tasting like mildew when everyone else said it was delicious). I also find myself getting winded easily and had a bit of pain like what you describe.
My nephew got it and never had any symptoms but had a positive test. That's the common situation.
Then there's my friend Katherine, who got it in the Spring and had a terrible fever and chills, and then was getting better and one day had sudden breathing problems. She called 911 but by the time the ambulance arrived she was dead. She was 43. She had some underlying chronic health issues, but still...I would never have thought she was that at risk.
The smart thing to do would have been to have the elderly and vulnerable quarantine while the rest of us got herd immunity and the thing ran its course. Even if the immunity goes away it would have ended a long time ago and we could get a vaccine on a less rushed schedule.
Sure, 80% manage it fine on their own. But 15% need oxygen in a hospital, and another 5% need intensive care.
Let's look at this with a very simplistic model: assume that for people without chronic issues (1), 95% can manage at home, 5% need hospital care and, of those, 1% need intensive care (MUCH lower, since only healthy people count) . And that without restrictions/social distancing everyone would have it within a year. For 200 million Americans that would mean 10 million hospitalizations and 2 million people in the ICUs. The numbers I found on the duration puts the length of stay at about 1 week. Spreading this evenly over the year means that there would be 70 million hospital bed-nights, or on average a little below 200 000 people hospitalized for covid, of about 38 000 in ICUs.
Comparing with the numbers from my post above regarding the number of hospital beds, that is twice as many as are currently hospitalized with covid-19. And now hospitals in many places are running full, almost like NYC did in April.
And the numbers I put here was averaged over a year, in reality there would be times with lower numbers but also peaks at least 50% higher (so 3 times the current numbers, which are a significant burden on hospitals).
(1) One such is obesity, which 40% of Americans have. Combine that with other issues/age and we're talking of well over half of the population isolating. Okay, that might mean that my numbers above are too high, since more people would be isolating.
Currently the number of deaths is about 2% of cases. Let's lower that by a factor of 10 for healthy people. If 100 million Americans have that, it'll lead to 200 000 deaths. That is not an insignificant fraction of 2.5 million annual deaths, of which maybe 270 000 are under 50. So it would about double the number of younger people dieing.
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