There aren’t any excess medical professionals to staff a scalable COVID ward.

Are we really that unimaginative as a society so as to walk the decision tree all the way down to "not enough doctors and nurses" as the intractable problem behind all this suffering and strife? I used the word "scalable" with intention. There has been more than enough time to design a protocol and train less experienced staff that could be utilized in most cases. Highly trained medical professionals would be reserved for unique situations, which surely are not the bulk of covid hospitalizations. Hundreds of billions could have been invested into a scalable protocol that doesn't require drafting of existing medical professionals, and the cost would have still just been a drop in a bucket compared to how much has been spent on relief and how much has been lost by society as a whole. Other than R&D in pills and shots, the response to covid has been lethargic and hopeless. They didn't use this excuse of lack of medical professionals during the polio epidemic - for those that got left behind by the vaccine, they used ingenuity and created the iron lung.