Something that has never been properly explained to me is how "overwhelmed" the hospitals were in relation to their normally "overwhelmed" state.

I wrote a script which extracted time series data from one of the hospital bed data APIs in my country around April last year and ran it for a couple of months. I wasn't able to make any useful conclusions from the data other than more patients were coming than going for a certain time periods and some wards had beds reassigned to other wards. It would have been a lot better if I had access to historical data to compare it to previous years.