I've got personal experience with how COVID-related ICU capacity delays can result in death, in ways that aren't being counted now and might not ever be counted

I've got personal experience with how COVID-related ICU capacity delays can result in death, in ways that aren't being counted now and might not ever be counted. Delaying diagnostic surgery to grade an invasive cancer by 3 months is more than enough time to allow for metastasis, and to turn a potentially treatable outcome into a rapidly terminal one. What hurts me so much is that the delay I experienced was in February of last year, before we understood much of anything about COVID, vaccines weren't optimistically expected to happen for years, and hospitals were restricting capacity out of precaution as much as demand — national reported cases per day were under 100 in late February, compared to today, where they're over 160,000. So much of this was mitigable, if not preventable. So many people have already suffered, been permanently injured, or died when the outcomes could've been better. In the United States we — collectively, societally, and systematically — failed to avoid any of it out of selfishness more than anything else.