I don't think people understand that the ideal and preferred, ICU beds/rooms for COVID patients are not the typical ICU beds/rooms that are available for other serious medical issues, and may not understand that converting normal rooms into such ICU beds is not a simple, or even doable. ICU beds/rooms for COVID patients are Negative pressure rooms. (Since this is Anandtech, a board full of nerds, I don't think I need to explain what Negative pressure is). They have alarms that go off if that "seal" is broken that changes that Negative pressure. To do this, each room has to have it's own ventilation system, or extra equipment has to be brought in to be able to manipulate the pressure. So keep that in mind also when visualizing availability of ICU beds. (I learned this with my brother, when he was in such a room for COVID patients before he died).
My SO is the head of intake for a medium sized healthcare company. That basically means she works the logistics of how to distribute the equipment and resources needed to care for patients. What she is trying to tell people is that the equipment, like the negative pressure room, is important but not really critical. They have done without those things in the past and knows how to work without them in emergencies. Those things make medicine easier, safer, and more effective. The one thing you absolutely can't do without in medicine is the people that care for the patients, and that is what you are really talking about when you talk about ICU beds.
In a typical ICU you have about 1 nurse for every 2-3 patients, outside of ICU you have 1 nurse for every 12-20 (mattering on the level of care) patients. The main difference between a 'normal' bed and a ICU bed is how many nurses you have for that bed. So, while they can work around not having a negative pressure room if they really have to, they can't work around not having a nurse to to attend that patient.
When big emergencies happen there is a pool of nurses they can move around to help, both locally and nationally, but what is going on right now is that the emergency is everywhere, and it is not ending. There is an finite number of nurses, and we are simply running out, so we are asking them to work more and more hours. That was doable for a few months. But we are now into years. We are burning them out, and because we are so short sighted we even stopped training new ones.