Right or wrong, the idea is to prevent the bodies from piling up - so if there aren’t any after all this is said and done, it could be argued that it either wasn’t necessary or that it worked.
The idea is to keep the places with relatively small numbers of cases that way, so that medical resources can be allocated to where they are needed the most.
It’s the places that have few cases that need to hunker down the most, since those places can still be spared.