That is also underselling the situation because that observation is pretty normal too. Typically hospitals are at breaking point, they're funded to roughly matc

That is also underselling the situation because that observation is pretty normal too. Typically hospitals are at breaking point, they're funded to roughly match demand. If anything unusual happens then they reach breaking point. In my experience in Australia we get a "hospitals at breaking point" announcement every bad flu season because they are funded to just-about cope with a bad flu season. COVID was worse than a bad flu season by a big margin, but that doesn't change the fact that the blip was relatively small. You're going to see hospital capacity being forced to expend to more-than-COVID levels just to deal with the baseline number of oldies in the next decade.