Ideally you have a highly functional public health system, testing and tracing, implement quarantine, reasonable isolation measures and border controls and don't need need these heroic medical interventions.

By the time you have hundreds or thousands of people on ventilators I think it is clear you have done something wrong.

Looking at the results in countries that were pro-active dealing with this pandemic and it is hard to see how it got so out of control in many other countries you would naively expect to have equivalent or better preparedness.

We are not out of this yet and perhaps even countries that have just about eliminated this virus will get overconfident and fall to later waves but at the moment it looks like there are some clear winners and losers.