For every person in the hospital due to covid is another person not able to receive care.

Hospital beds aren't unlimited.

ICU beds full? Someone has a heart attack? Well, sucks to be them.

That's the part of covid everyone is ignoring: it creates an additional burden on the health care system, hospitals that normally are booked solid for surgeries can no longer handle those cases due to the emergency influx from a pandemic spreading like wildfire.

Hospitals hit capacity and run out of beds and ventilators. This is a hard threshold. Once you pass it, mortality goes through the roof.

Running out of ventilators would have minimal impact on the mortality rate. Mechanical ventilation is currently only used as a last resort for <5% of hospitalized patients, and even with ventilators many of those patients don't survive.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/nhcs/intubation-ventilator-...

Beds can be added on a temporary basis. Availability of trained healthcare providers is the more relevant limit.

My point is even if hospitals were closed completely, it still seems unlikely that 20% of people who catch COVID would die from it.