> Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen
You can't keep the staff and maintain the gear needed to handle 100x "once in a century" event all the time, it just doesn't work. Most health systems are already huge money sinks and on the brink of collapse in normal times... This isn't a "a bomb injured 300 people" event, we can't live 100% prepared to every single potential threats.
you don't need to 100x it, but you can keep 20-30% of slack in the system, instead of literally cutting or not even keeping up funding for one of the most important sectors of the country. Nurses and healthcare workers have been overworked for ages in Germany, and not just here. With the NHS in England it's the exact same situation. Most of the countries had higher capacity ten or twenty years ago then we have now. What's the point of getting richer and growing if your public infrastructure decays?
And the other thing you can do is, actually have a prepared and tested response plan to a crisis. Our reaction to this was to dust off some plans from the the shelves, every individual state had different systems in place, two years in we don't really have a functioning digital app, but ten different solutions none of which more than a fraction of people have adopted, and so forth. Completely avoidable chaos if anyone was actually in charge of readying the country for these situations.
You can't keep the staff and maintain the gear needed to handle 100x "once in a century" event all the time, it just doesn't work. Most health systems are already huge money sinks and on the brink of collapse in normal times... This isn't a "a bomb injured 300 people" event, we can't live 100% prepared to every single potential threats.