Good points. However: Although frequently highlighted as a reason for alarm, ICUs frequently run at 95% utilization or more. That's a feature of major flu seas

Good points. However: Although frequently highlighted as a reason for alarm, ICUs frequently run at 95% utilization or more. That's a feature of major flu seasons too, press reports of hospitals getting overloaded. It's not great, but it's not something unique to COVID. Nowhere ran out of ventilators, if I recall correctly. Demand for it vanished as doctors realized that the model projections were wrong, and that they'd been over-using ventilators anyway (and thus contributing to the initial spike of early deaths). The San Antonio story you cite says this: "We've got two slots at one of our bigger hospitals for people who pass. We need more than two. We had 14 die in the hospital this weekend. I don't want to alarm people, because they are not all COVID cases" Again, the numbers we are talking about here are small even at the very start when doctors were unfortunately raising the death rate by over-using ventilators. A hospital needing assistance because it has a grand total of two places to put bodies is not a world-changing crisis that needed to wreck the economy, destroy people's lives and create the most totalitarian society seen in the west since WW2.