You're right, but the problem is that a lot of people are neither thinking nor empathetic. They aren't taking this as seriously as they need to because all they're concerned with is that it won't kill them; they don't care that they could still be spreading it to people that are in serious trouble if they get coronavirus.
Another problem is that the media and the government keep trying to turn this into a political statement or economic issue. Besides the disgusting lack of morality necessary to try and exploit a pandemic that's killed 16,000 people, it's keeping people from focusing on more important things like practising social distancing and avoiding panic buying. Plus since they're trying so hard to keep the economy from collapsing, they're throwing trillions of dollars around while most people haven't even been tested for coronavirus. So even on the off chance that they "save" the economy (which would probably only last a few weeks anyway), they'll have done nothing to increase the amount of tests, which would help limit the spread of the virus by identifying infected people.
The sooner this mess is over, the better, but the situation in the US is going to take a while to improve unless the authorities actually do something more drastic. Right now, America has the third-highest number of confirmed cases* of any country; China is first and Italy is second. The USA just passed Spain, which is now in fourth, because testing became more available in America. The difference is that China, Italy and Spain all took drastic measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus far sooner than the USA, meaning the situation in America deteriorated more. Plus they still haven't taken measures as drastic as the other countries - I know Spain and Italy are on lockdown right now - and it seems like those measures are more of an eventuality than a possibility at this point. People aren't listening to shelter-in-place orders or self-quarantining when they need to, as Rand Paul demonstrated.** Quarantines need to have stricter guidelines that can actually be enforced - for example, I'm not sure if it ever went through, but in Israel the Shin Bet was reportedly given authority to track the paths of people confirmed to have coronavirus*** in order to identify people they may have infected.
Basically it comes down to getting people to actually adhere to the very simple and repetitively explained guidelines that they continue to ignore. Since that would require either some sort of altruism or enforcement by authourities, we're probably going to need enforcement by authourities. Otherwise, G-d only knows how much this could escalate. Hopefully soon people will figure it out and stay home instead of buying unholy amounts of toilet paper and licking toilet seats for TikToks.
* Source:
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/03/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/
** Source:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/22/politics/rand-paul-coronavirus/index.html
*** Source:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/1584548041-coronavirus-surveillance-what-can-the-israeli-gov-t-know-about-its-citizens