If we're having severe health care shortages, governors need to lockdown and activate the national guard. Legislatures (and judges if necessary) should have worked out the necessary conditions by now, so that these actions can come with as wide a sense of legitimacy as possible.
let me add that the legislative process should produce a compromise on what can/should be done and when. I'll admit I'm assuming that at some point, all states would take such action. But maybe some wouldn't, no matter how bad it got. Or some might take a completely different approach to keep the health care system working.
my main points are to prioritize maintaining care capacity (avoiding the cascading problem pandemics can cause), local focus and the idea of legitimacy.
@valleyforge
I think you're mistaking efforts to understand what's going on with efforts to take action. you're right on the former in that to do so will bias the results, but regarding the latter, aren't we unable to figure out what to do till we know what we're trying to accomplish. I did include an open question of whether this is actually happening first.