It's hard to disentangle cause and effect though. Countries that were very hard hit also had the most extreme government reactions to it. This can compromise the efficiency of the healthcare system, for example, I've read that in Spain at the peak of the epidemic many nurses and doctors were self-isolating because they'd tested positive, so there was a huge loss of healthcare capacity. Then later on it was discovered that a lot of positive tests are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people don't transmit the disease, so this just hurt healthcare capacity for no reason.

Many countries had problems with care home workers abandoning their jobs, for example to return to their home countries before borders closed. There are some quite horrific stories of the terrible conditions created in care homes in some of the places with excess death spikes.

The imagery of ice-rink morgues etc had a similar effect. There was no real demand surge for morgue space, but undertakers were refusing to work until they were supplied with ample PPE because they thought they would be infected by the bodies with a killer virus. Same story in Bergamo. So then a sudden shortfall in PPE was converted into a shortfall in funeral capacity, even though at that point there was no sudden tsunami of bodies. This then led to more panic especially amongst health system workers.

It's very hard to disentangle what really went on here.