The ventilators were a death sentence. Many of the people who died early on, died not due to COVID, but due to their lungs getting damaged by high pressure vents. Some were kept on high pressure for much longer than is normal.

There was a lot of bad advice coming from doctors in Europe, and also there was the idea if you had them on a vent, they were on a closed air system and couldn't spread COVID in the hospital. This was disastrous.

Doctors do not use them unless necessary today, but it's no doubt this is why many of the early death counts, especially among younger people, was so high in places with high vent use.