There was plenty basis in reality.
And do please explain how NY spending money on building additional hospitals killed tens of thousands.
Have you been following the sequence of events? The governors of several states saw the modeling that predicted massive shortages of hospital beds, ICU’s and vents that was supposed to result in mass casualties due to lack of capacity. They panicked, and put all of their resources into building field hospitals and the like, and decided that freeing up hospital capacity was so crucial that it made sense to sacrifice the seniors by emptying the hospital wards of seniors who were contagious with covid, and sending them back into long term care facilities, which resulted in tens of thousands of resident deaths. They left the seniors to die in the LTC facilities, not even bothering to move them to the empty field hospitals and hospital ships because that wouldn’t leave room for the massive overload of younger covid patients the model predicted were soon to come.
A more realistic assessment would have made it obvious that the exact opposite was necessary; deploy all resources to protect the highest risk seniors. Instead of field hospitals, they should have equipped LTC facilities with adequate PPE and large scale testing. Positive seniors should have been moved away from the healthy population. The result would have been a fraction of the death toll.