Supplemental care was shockingly effective even when we didn’t have disease specific treatments. It’s hard to make an exact estimate supplemental care like IV’s, oxygen, and in extreme case ventilators roughly cut peoples likelihood of dying in half.
Unfortunately that shit gets expensive. Mean intensive care unit cost and length of stay were 31,574 +/- 42,570 dollars and 14.4 days +/- 15.8 for patients requiring mechanical ventilation and 12,931 +/- 20,569 dollars and 8.5 days +/- 10.5 for those not requiring mechanical ventilation. Daily costs were greatest on intensive care unit day 1 (mechanical ventilation, 10,794 dollars; no mechanical ventilation, 6,667 dollars), decreased on day 2 (mechanical ventilation:, 4,796 dollars; no mechanical ventilation, 3,496 dollars), and became stable after day 3 (mechanical ventilation, 3,968 dollars; no mechanical ventilation, 3,184 dollars). Adjusting for patient and hospital characteristics, the mean incremental cost of mechanical ventilation in intensive care unit patients was 1,522 dollars per day (p < .001). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15942342/
Meanwhile because people assumed there was little medicine could do many preventable deaths occurred at home.