Soft 404s in Google Search Console

I have a recurring problem with Search Console reporting an increase in soft 404s on my site. It seems that Googlebot is crawling day archives for days without events in them. Here are a bunch that appeared within 3 days or so after I had cleared out the last batch and messed with settings here and there trying to solve for this:

events/2016-01-15/
events/2016-01-19/
events/2016-01-21/
events/2016-01-23/
events/2016-01-24/
events/2016-03-08/
events/2016-03-09/
events/2016-03-10/
events/2016-03-14/
events/2016-03-17/
events/2016-03-18/
events/2016-04-10/
events/2016-07-31/
events/2016-08-02/
events/2016-11-03/
events/2016-11-04/
events/2016-11-05/
events/2016-11-07/
events/2016-11-11/
events/2016-11-29/
events/2016-12-02/
events/2016-12-04/
events/2016-12-06/
events/2016-12-08/

The only way I can seem to find a way to “crawl” these empty day pages is by going to one of these pages, or search results, then from the Search bar in the “Day Of” or “Events From” calendar dropdown, you can select any other day that doesn’t have any events and get the same No Results Found page, which is what seems to be showing as a soft 404. I turned off Day view hoping that would resolve it, but no such luck (I have Month view default, List view also available).

Also not sure why it’s hitting seemingly random dates throughout the year and skipping many other empty dates.

Thoughts on how to stop Google from crawling these pages?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/the-events-calendar/