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Hospitals have been routinely overloaded by seasonal flu before COVID-19. We just kind of dealt with it and didn't take drastic measures.

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

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You seem to be conflating "overloaded enough to require overtime and additional temporary space to compensate" with "overloaded so that even with overtime and every other tool in our belt we are unable to compensate and have to ration critical life saving care, directly resulting in unnecessary deaths."

Those two aren't really comparable, though the former really should have clued us in to how big a risk the latter was.

I'm not so sure they're not comparable, they certainly seem to at minimum be a gradient of the same curve. "Unnecessary deaths" is a tricky thing to attempt to claim, and you'll need a bit more than shouting into the void to back such a claim up. Indeed you'd need some pretty detailed analysis to claim an unusual number of deaths directly attributable to a lack of available care at facilities typically able to provide said care, specifically because they simply didn't have the resources to administer the care.

In other words, I doubt your latter scenario at the more extreme end of overloading was widely the case (in the first world), perhaps you have some analysis backing it up?

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