This is something that people often forgot - even if hospitals do not reach their full "paper" capacity, you can easily burn out or even kill your irreplaceable (in the pandemic timescale) medical personnel, if they have to deal with constant influx of infected patients over long periods.

Not to mention hospitals usually shutting down elective procedures once the amount of infected patients in their care crosses a certain threshold.

The way that we discovered dexamethasone can reduce mortality in ICU patients was through enough people being infected and dying to run studies testing a whole bunch of potential treatments on them. There's very limited potential to decrease the number of deaths by buying time for this to be discovered, at least from a global perspective.