https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33388794/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=ventilator+covid19&fil...
The majority conclusion I've seen in Europe about why earlier death rates were so high in some places was that the hospitals were overloaded and therefore didn't have enough capacity (staff, equipment, etc) and therefore some died due to there not being enough ventilators.
This isn't my field of expertise so I'm very open to finding out that my impression is wrong, but my gut feeling is that your comment is not accurate.
Coronavirus weakens the lung tissue, but the ability to breathe (inhale / exhale) is unaffected.
Basically the body was forcing people to have shallow breath to preserve the damaged lung tissue and allow it to recover. The ventilator essentially restored their breathing back to full force, which turned people's lungs into soup basically.
Makes sense as an explanation to me, but like I said, I don't have any official sources for that.
This explanation sounds very implausible and simplistic. When a person has extremely low oxygen level and you are giving them maximum oxygen possible, what can you do? Ventilator or ECMO (which is probably even more dangerous).
The standard was to move people with terrible O2 sats at the start of the outbreak to ventilation immedatley, even if they did not seem to bad.
That seems to be replaced with providing high levels of O2/CPAP and only moving people to ventilation when that is not sufficient, even if O2 sats would normally indicate ventilation. This is why vent usage is a lot lower this second time round, even with more patients in hopsital.
I would be surprised if they put someone on a ventilator just because his O2 level was low without first putting him on O2 and maxing out the flow. Little experience that I do have is that people are first put on O2, then if their saturation remains low they increase the flow until they can increase no more. At that moment they are a candidate for a ventilator.
Maybe they "relaxed" the criteria after a while if ventilators showed bad outcomes but when people are maxed out on O2, there is little you can do.
[1] https://elemental.medium.com/how-one-covid-19-doctor-became-...
There was a lot of bad advice coming from doctors in Europe, and also there was the idea if you had them on a vent, they were on a closed air system and couldn't spread COVID in the hospital. This was disastrous.
Doctors do not use them unless necessary today, but it's no doubt this is why many of the early death counts, especially among younger people, was so high in places with high vent use.