Everyone is so extreme.
Nurses and hospital staff are not so completely overwhelmed. I work across 9 hospitals (and all the offsites for each one) that are in rather populated suburbs, so not in the super dense cities. However, the nurses and staff in the suburbs of an extremely populated city (Chicago) have never been overrun by covid patients. I'm not saying it hasn't happened but that is not normal. Also, hospitals themselves are causing the patients to be funneled to hospitals over asinine policy like if you have a headache any satellite clinic sends you to the hospital because of possible covid. Clinics were near ghost towns a lot of the time because of this policy and lots of people got sent to the hospital for no reason. I saw it first hand, a lady was light-headed and had likely blood pressures issues (known issue she had) and she got turned away because she had a headache. Maybe she didn't go to the hospital because of the increase cost and something bad happened to her, maybe she did go and had to pay more than she could afford at the time and hospital staff had to take care of a patient that they shouldn't have had to, maybe she just went home and was fine, but whatever it was, it was pretty fucked up. That is policy of at least one other major healthcare system as well where I did some printer installs for a week. It's not like clinics can't treat early covid either. It's even worse that in the US covid isn't even treated early unless you find like the 2 doctors in your state that will actually treat you. People have been delayed treatments and screenings for stuff like cancer, my cousin graduated medical school to become a nurse for the cancer department and he waited months to start working because of the pandemic. There has definitely been or will be cancer deaths because it was caught too late (sure, it's probably not that many, but it is a thing). There's been so many failures in so many areas concerning the pandemic, it's pretty ridiculous.
Nurses and hospital staff are not so completely overwhelmed. I work across 9 hospitals (and all the offsites for each one) that are in rather populated suburbs, so not in the super dense cities. However, the nurses and staff in the suburbs of an extremely populated city (Chicago) have never been overrun by covid patients. I'm not saying it hasn't happened but that is not normal. Also, hospitals themselves are causing the patients to be funneled to hospitals over asinine policy like if you have a headache any satellite clinic sends you to the hospital because of possible covid. Clinics were near ghost towns a lot of the time because of this policy and lots of people got sent to the hospital for no reason. I saw it first hand, a lady was light-headed and had likely blood pressures issues (known issue she had) and she got turned away because she had a headache. Maybe she didn't go to the hospital because of the increase cost and something bad happened to her, maybe she did go and had to pay more than she could afford at the time and hospital staff had to take care of a patient that they shouldn't have had to, maybe she just went home and was fine, but whatever it was, it was pretty fucked up. That is policy of at least one other major healthcare system as well where I did some printer installs for a week. It's not like clinics can't treat early covid either. It's even worse that in the US covid isn't even treated early unless you find like the 2 doctors in your state that will actually treat you. People have been delayed treatments and screenings for stuff like cancer, my cousin graduated medical school to become a nurse for the cancer department and he waited months to start working because of the pandemic. There has definitely been or will be cancer deaths because it was caught too late (sure, it's probably not that many, but it is a thing). There's been so many failures in so many areas concerning the pandemic, it's pretty ridiculous.