Italy, Iran, Spain, and Wuhan all show that thousands of deaths are possible. The Lombardy region of Italy alone, with a population smaller than Florida, had 546 dead today, a number that was in the 300s yesterday. Even with the clampdown, they still haven't peaked. Would we like to extrapolate this out to the US, with roughly 20X the population of Lombardy and see 10,000 dead per day at the peak?

I'm pretty sure not.

We can discuss whether the cure is worse than the illness, and I think that's valid, but let's not pretend that the illness doesn't exist.