I don't think there was any shortage of medical professionals. There was a shortage relative to the demand predicted by models, but as that demand never materialized neither did the shortages (for COVID treatment).

Medical procedures were postponed because some governments emptied out hospitals in anticipation of huge influxes of patients, they believed this would happen due to academic models with no validity. So this then did lead to backlogs for non-COVID treatments, but it was an artificial backlog and how bad it was depended on how quickly governments realized the academics were charlatans. In Switzerland hospitals were only emptied out for a period of weeks because the private hospitals started going bankrupt and laying off medical staff due to lack of work which played very badly with the "we will be hit with a huge wave of demand" narrative, so they quietly reversed the policy and hospitals went back to work. In the UK OTOH the NHS stayed emptied out for months. With no bankruptcies to deal with the problem was able to remain ignored for longer, and so they ended up with unsolvable backlogs. They're working their way through it slowly now, but partly by just letting people die whilst waiting. Catastrophic :(

Everything I'm saying was widely known in the community of "sceptics" who realized that the government narratives were built on lies early on, but admittedly in 2020 when this was going down that community was quite small.