Who are suffering severe hypoxemia. They feel as if they can breath without assistance, but their oxygen levels are low. In cases low enough to be damaging the brain and other organs.

Most cases of "happy hypoxemia" are nowhere near critically dangerous. For example this case of happy hypoixemia at 70% blood O2 levels was treated successfully without intubation. Organ damage typically does not occur until blood O2 is below 40%.

(Note: although even doctors often use the terms semi-interchangeably, hypoxemia and hypoxia are not the same and you can have one without the other.)

There was a change in policy about that. But they didn't know then what they know now.

But they did know. Like so much of the Covid response, the consensus was thrown out in early 2020, and then only months or years later did the "experts" grudgingly acknowledge that the pre-Covid consensus was correct. Starting with "happy hypoxia" itself, which is not unique to Covid but can occur with any respiratory disease.

Here's the Wall Street Journal: "Hospitals Retreat From Early Covid Treatment and Return to Basics". Quote:

Now hospital treatment for the most critically ill looks more like it did before the pandemic. Doctors hold off longer before placing patients on ventilators. Patients get less powerful sedatives, with doctors checking more frequently to see if they can halt the drugs entirely and dialing back how much air ventilators push into patients’ lungs with each breath. “Let us go back to basics,” said Dr. Eduardo Oliveira, executive medical director for critical-care services for AdventHealth Central Florida, which recommends its doctors stick with pre-pandemic guidelines for ventilator use. “The less you deviate from it, the better.”

Doctors knew about prone positioning for many years. I don't know exactly when, but this 2013 study involved hospitals with at least five years experience in prone positioning. This study is from 1999 so I think it is fair to say that prone positioning has been known for decades.

Doctors knew about the risks to the patients of intubation for many years too. This paper from 2003 discusses the risks and benefits of intubation for SARS patients. Notice that they used intubation only if non-invasive ventilation failed, and they gave antibiotics to prevent secondary pneumonia. And yet in 2020 many hospitals used invasive ventilation in preference to non-invasive, and failed to give antibiotics when patients developed secondary bacterial pneumonia.

Why did they not treat pneumonia with antibiotics when that was the standard of care for SARS? Secondary bacterial pneumonia has been a known risk for intubation for decades. Why was that knowledge ignored during that first few critical weeks and months? The pre-Omicron strains of SARS-2 were dangerous enough but the fatality rate in New York and Milan were astonishingly high, far higher than anywhere else has seen, in some cases almost 100% of the patients put on ventilators died.

Why did the New York governor order that Covid-positive elderly people be sent to nursing homes? (Aside: that article repeats the claim that New York hospitals were overwhelmed, but the data shows that they never reached full capacity --- as do the many, many TikTok videos made by nursing staff during the early Covid days when they were supposedly overwhelmed by cases. They were so overwhelmed they had time to make Tik Tok videos dancing in empty wards.)

The point is that what was done was done for the patient.

How can you say that when you have front-line doctors and nurses saying the opposite? Serious mainstream media organisations like the Wall Street Journal, not known for spreading wacky conspiracy theories, disagree with you. Papers and letters published in peer-reviewed medical journals disagree with you. The Safe Airway Society published a consensus statement explicitly stating that doctors should use early intubation "to prevent the additional risk to staff".

The Wall Street Journal wrote "doctors often pre-emptively put patients on ventilators or gave powerful sedatives largely abandoned in recent years. The aim was to save the seriously ill and protect hospital staff from Covid-19." They quoted Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at University of Michigan and Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in Ann Arbor: “We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic”. (Emphasis added.)

• Quote: "Prioritise a planned early intubation rather than an emergency intubation, at high risk of contagion".

• Quote: "the initial consensus was to start invasive mechanical ventilation as soon as possible ... to reduce respiratory droplet aerosolization for healthcare workers".

I'm not saying that intubation was always only done to prevent medical staff from getting Covid, nor am I arguing that intubation is never justified. But it is clear that early policy, driven by information coming out of China and the WHO and supported by a DARPA bio-warefare expert, overused intubation and killed many Covid patients who otherwise probably would have survived. And that was done at least in part to protect medical staff.

How can you keep denying that fact when the doctors themselves say that's what they did?

Your an American I see and it seems you've never had beer outside your country.