Re ventilators specifically, remember that we had basically no treatment for severe Covid last March. The best we could do was sedate you, force air into your lungs, and hope for the best. Now we know that dexamethasone helps in severe cases, we have monoclonal antibody treatments, and generally we are better able to treat someone who would have needed a ventilator if we'd treated them last March.

In general, I'm with the Tyler Cowen thought bubble: whatever we spent on actual treatments which didn't work out, it wasn't enough.

Some of your criticisms are pretty incontrovertible. The Less Wrong zeitgeist in April 2020 (perhaps even earlier) was that surface cleaning was dubious - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/riB8m9PBvXJziFYMv/on-covid-1... - much like they were extremely early on the "loss of taste and smell" train (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/march-coro...).