Table 4.

Adverse consequences of precautionary actions, expecting excess of hospitalization and ICU needs (as forecasted by multiple models).

PRECAUTIONARY ACTION	JUSTIFICATION	WHAT WENT WRONG
Stop elective procedures, delay other treatments	Focus available resources on preparing for the COVID-19 onslaught	Treatment for major conditions like cancer were delayed, (Sud et al., 2020) effective screening programs were cancelled, procedures not done on time had suboptimal outcomes
Send COVID-19 patients to nursing homes	Acute hospital beds are needed for the predicted COVID-19 onslaught, models predict hospital beds will not be enough	Thousands of COVID-19 infected patients were sent to nursing homes(AP counts: over 4500 virus patients sent to NY nursing homes, 2020) where large numbers of ultra-vulnerable individuals are clustered together; may have massively contributed to eventual death toll
Inform the public that we are doing our best, but it is likely that hospitals will be overwhelmed by COVID-19	Honest communication with the general public	Patients with major problems like heart attacks did not come to the hospital to be treated, (De Filippo et al., 2020) while these are diseases that are effectively treatable only in the hospital; an unknown, but probably large share of excess deaths in the COVID-19 weeks were due to these causes rather than COVID-19 itself (Grisin, 2020;, Mansour et al., 2020)
Re-orient all hospital operations to focus on COVID-19	Be prepared for the COVID-19 wave, strengthen the response to crisis	Most hospitals saw no major COVID-19 wave and also saw a massive reduction in overall operations with major financial cost, leading to furloughs and lay-off of personnel; this makes hospitals less prepared for any major crisis in the future