Like a while bunch of places did in March and April last year: build emergency capacity during what was supposed to be only a short several-week lockdown. Instead, when the capacity went mostly unused during the lockdown, it was quietly dismantled and lockdowns continued.

Also, we knew by April last year that ventilators were a bad choice: Doctors were jumping to it because of a specific weird symptom (blood oxygen levels impossibly low), but they had to keep turning the ventilators to higher settings to get an effect - to the point it was causing further lung damage. There's a bunch of less damaging ways to get more oxygen into a patient they'd been shifting to: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...