https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685049/

There was a lot of misinformation and confusing data at the start of the pandemic regarding hospital beds. Here in the US, hospitals tend to operate near capacity as SOP - a result of for profit healthcare seeking max profitability. Most hospitals here also started reserving a percentage of their beds, both ICU and general care, for covid patients. These reserved but sometimes unoccupied beds were not factored in when local hospitals reported being at capacity - so a local radio station might say "these local hospitals are at max capacity" without reporting that they still have 5% beds free specifically for covid patients. I suspect this may have caused some deaths by people not seeking care because they thought it wasn't available when it was, however I haven't seen anything to validate that hypothesis (and I doubt there will ever be any data).

One interesting sidenote is that the military hospitals that President Trump rolled out while he was still in charge had very little effect:

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals...