Edit: also, the military, FEMA, and non-profits built temporary hospitals in spring, but they weren't needed.
Federally, there was no strategy because federal powers were devoted to promoting the pandemic (e.g., via the Defense Production Act invocation to shield the meat packing industry from state safety efforts) rather than fighting it.
OTOH, hospitals also require skilled staff, which takes longer to build.
Absolutely. Steve the UberEats delivery driver can be moved into the ICU, putting folks on ventilators and providing critical care in a week or so, right?
And Gustavo, the busboy can be out providing EMT services in just a few days, right?
A doctor requires 8+ years of post-secondary education, in addition to several years of on-the-job training.
An RN requires at least 6+ years of post-secondary education, plus several years of on-the-job training. LPNs even longer.
So, yes. In the short term (~6-18 months), staff are most certainly fairly fixed resources.
As for hospital beds, those are limited to the square footage available for them. Sure, temporary hospital wards can be constructed and put in place fairly quickly, but unless Steve and Gustavo are staffing them, you still have a big problem.
I don't give up. Make a temporary hospital with ip web cams pointed at all the vitals. Build a quick and dirty dashboard that lets doctors/nurses monitor dozens of patients at once instead of having to physically walk around everywhere. If engineers can get more done with less using automation, medical professionals can do it too.
You're putting words in my mouth and then arguing against them. I think that's called a 'strawman argument'.
They can, however, collectively produce 9 babies, 9 months after the start date.
Normal hospitals are already staffed at pretty close to the maximum rate of less qualified to more expert staff for their caseload, and the easy caseload that requires less expert share of time is pushed out of hospitals entirely by the crisis. Surging additional minimally trained staff doesn't help anything.
I believe ICU nursing stations already use such dashboards routinely.
If they didn't, developing and testing new software to a level where it was reliable enough for such use without being checked up around, and training staff and adapting processes for it, would not be a quick process and, perhaps more importantly, would take staff time of clinical staff to participate in consultation and validation instead of clinical duties while it progressed.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. The solution doesn't have to be perfect. It can be quick and dirty now, and perfected later. It might be worth it, given the current solution is pushing hundreds of millions into poverty among other disastrous consequences.
Quick and dirty IT solutions often reduce efficiency compared to not having them, and that's more likely the less involvement and validation with the target workers you have in the course of building it.
Plus, again, this is something hospitals already have and use and which already is factored into staffing requirements, and you are responding only to the theoretical problem that would exist if it actually was a new innovation being developed.
In an effort to stave off that danger, local governments enacted lockdowns with the intent of reducing the spread of the virus.
The virus, in the United States, has an established death rate of around 1.5% and a hospitalization rate higher than that.
It also experiences exponential growth.
Our hospitals didn't have the capacity to handle all the _potential_ load; and, once they're approaching that capacity, it's already too late and they'll blow past it. That's the danger of exponential growth.
Let's imagine doublings:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128.
If total capacity is 100, the moment that capacity is less than 20% used up, we're 2-3 timesteps away from using over 100%. It is a very dangerous gamble, and controversial decisions are made or not made and the worst part is that, when you do the safe thing, you have no way of being certain or explaining that the bad thing would have or could have happened, because "it's only 20%" and that looks small.