What hospitals are you referring to?
Are you aware of any patients in the US that have been denied hospital beds, ventilators, etc.?
There seems to be a confusion between the anticipated crisis, and the reality on the ground. Even in NYC, I'm not aware of any hospital system needing to turn patients covid patients away.
Read this first-hand account from a doctor in NYC: https://dnyuz.com/2020/04/14/im-an-e-r-doctor-in-new-york-no...
"Some others wait days in the E.R. for an inpatient bed, languishing in hallways. Their fates remain unknown. I pass by them when I first arrive at the E.R. and when I leave at the end of the day. Sometimes they are still there the next day. If they are awake, I’m hesitant to make eye contact. I’m too ashamed that after nearly 15 years as a doctor, I can’t do much more for them except put an oxygen mask over their nose and mouth."
https://nypost.com/2020/03/25/worker-at-nyc-hospital-where-n...
I accept your premise though, thats what makes this virus so scary, it kills otherwise healthy people even when the best treatment in the world is available. So what chance does an overweight ex smoker with pre diabetes like me have? Scary stuff!!
Many have had to resort to inferior alternatives for PPE as primary supplies have run out and global shortages have made them impossible to restock. The price of melt-blown non-woven fabric, the bottleneck in the production of N95 masks, has increased 10x as the machines to produce more take months to build. In countries like the US, people were initially told not to wear face masks so as to preserve the supply for hospital use; while the decision was not irrational, those countries where face mask usage by the general population was widespread saw much lower infection rates, and while the US has changed course it is still quite probable that if people had masks from the get go we'd be better off.
The shortage of ventilators has required rationing - ie where a patient would normally be put on a ventilator when they had much more mild symptoms (and better odds of survival) they are now delayed until the disease has further progressed. Luckily ventillators from less affected areas have been moved to worse hit ones which has taken the edge off the shortage to a degree.
Testing kits have been an extreme limitation throughout the outbreak. Their low availability meant it was difficult to trace contacts early on, major transport hubs like airports did not have adequate access to screen likely carriers until the disease had already reached most countries, and even now millions of perfectly healthy people are living in fear as the tests which would tell them they'll be fine are reserved for those showing symptoms.
While it has been pushed further than at any point in living memory, the US health system did not collapse; the outbreak has remained within a manageable range. This is true only because of massive measures taken to slow down the outbreak. Millions of people are in lockdown and huge sections of the economy have been either de jure or de facto shut down, which has already evaporated trillions of dollars in wealth, and no price can be put on the lives that have been lost as a result of avoidable infections and inferior medical care. If we were prepared, we wouldn't have had to take those emergency measures to keep the infection rate low enough for the healthcare system to survive.
Two weeks ago, we (by 'we' I mean the 320 million+ who don't live in NYC) were told by Cuomo that hospitals would be overrun and 40,000+ ventilators would be needed. Thankfully, that wasn't true. Was it?
HIV resists attempts to produce a vaccine because of its high mutation rate. There are too many strains out there for one vaccine to ever be effective and no guarantee that new strains won't pop up. Had HIV been caught and contained early on, a vaccine cocktail could probably have been developed that would be effective, but now you'd still have to worry about any HIV positive person having a strain you are not vaccinated against and thus would have to take the same protective measures.
Covid-19 has been mutating slowly thus far, so there is good reason to believe that if a vaccine is developed, it would be effective. It is possible and even probable that covid will remain endemic in some regions, particularly those with poor healthcare systems, and thus new strains will have time to emerge. We thus may need new vaccines for seasonal strains, similar to the flu, but still it will be much more manageable.
At the end of the day though, a vaccine may not be necessary for life to go back to something close to normal. The US already has about 1.3 million community spread pneumonia cases per year on average which has a substantially higher mortality rate and we get along just fine. The issue with Covid was that we were unprepared for it - hospitals did not have adequate amounts of supplies and equipment to handle the sudden spike in admitted patients. This leads to worse outcomes for those who catch the disease and extreme measures to limit the rate the disease spreads. If all the hospitals already had tons of extra ventilators lying around and if everyone already had face masks at home and if businesses already had adequate plans for sick leave in place then this outbreak would have been a mild inconvenience. While we obviously can't go back in time, we will be prepared moving forward.