From everything I've read, the hospitals in Lombardy could have surged even higher. Hospitals, in general, can expand care to many more people than they're scoped to handle. It means that each person gets worse quality care, but for an untreatable disease, there's little you can do to treat it anyway. Ventilator mortality is extremely high. My sense is ballpark 80% mortality rate, and that's just an average. With ventilator + age + pre-existing conditions assessment there's a large number of people that have extremely low chances of survival. At the level of triage decisions being made, I'd expect very few additional lives to have been lost.

I get that this is tragic. I get that people are dying. I get that this is an enormous mental and emotional toll on doctors. I get that we should be cautious and avoid needless exposure, especially to vulnerable populations or with unnecessary large social gatherings. But the lockdown is not saving lives. It's delaying inevitable deaths, at an economic cost which could kill even more people!