They may still be using central office phone switches that have a limited number of dial tone circuits. If enough phones are off hook but not dialing, other people will not get a dial tone.
It is laughable that YOUR definition of pandemic requires that more than 7-8 MILLION people die for a pandemic to be REAL, really?! You have no sympathy or empathy for lives that have been lost or debilitated by the Covid pandemic. So how many deaths are required for it to be a REAL pandemic? An accepted definition by many others is “The word pandemic refers to an epidemic that has gone international: the disease, localized in scope, now starts to appear in other countries and even on other continents, typically infecting a large number of people in a short amount of time”. It is not a hard number of human suffering to be a pandemic.
Yes, the distinctness of his succinctness. ;-)