I agree with you. I have worked for the last 10 weeks daily in a hospital that had the majority of COVID patients. I was on COVID floors multiple times a day. Twelve of us tested last week for antibodies, and only one of us was positive and she was able to pinpoint when and where she got it. So basically the outcome for eleven of us where the same as those who sheltered in place.
Your comparison has nothing to do with community spread in regards to shelter in place.
A hospital is a controlled environment. Unless you were hanging out in COVID19 patients’ rooms without PPE for extended periods, then your lack of infection is what your hospital’s infection control plan was designed to do.
I’m a nurse in the hardest hit county in CT, have spent most of my shifts on COVID19 units since March, and have not contracted the virus. All that time, I have been in full PPE, and have been extremely vigilant with hand hygiene and disinfecting equipment.
So, yes, it is possible to avoid contracting COVID19 without sheltering in place...if you wear PPE, change it between the people you interact with, have access to hand sanitizer every 10 feet, and keep people with active COVID19 infections in their rooms behind closed doors. Not exactly the conditions out in the community.
Unfortunately, some of my colleagues did contract COVID19, and the vast majority of them did so in the early days before we tested all our patients or knew how much spread was in the community. They weren’t wearing appropriate PPE, and the infectious patients weren’t confined to their rooms. One patient who later tested positive spent a lot of time in the hall, and exposed multiple people before anyone knew he had the virus.
Now we have closed some of our COVID19 units because community spread is going down. And it’s going down because the community has been sheltering in place.
Find me statistics of a community with a high initial caseload that didn’t shut down, and show me how their caseload fared in comparison with a community with a similarly high initial caseload that did shut down. That’s a valid comparison, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to find that kind of evidence to support your claim.
On the other hand, South Korea did a great job of containing the virus without a true shut down, but that was through a coordinated system of robust testing, voluntary quarantine, and consistent proper PPE wearing. The US is not close to being able to reproduce those measures. Until we can get our act together like South Korea, we are left with the blunt tool of shelter in place. Shelter in place sucks but it works.