What seems to be happening is that the medical system got hit with so many cases so quickly, they literally had to triage who to help. There just aren't enough respirators in any medical system to deal with this many patients. I've been reading reports from doctors and nurses in Lombardy that they quite literally had to decide to not help older patients with lower chances of survival because they had to prioritize their limited resources. It's gut wrenching.

And Italy, and specifically Lombardy, has a higher hospital bed to population and doctor to population ratio than the US.

And the US is even further behind that Italy was in aggressively testing patients for the coronavirus. This situation is very likely to repeat itself here, but at a bigger scale.