The thing is that countries like Germany that are apparently 'coping better' (ie lower mortality rate), have far more ventilators/ critical care beds per head of population than us.
Off the top of my head, USA has 29 critical care beds per 100,000 people (although you can only access them if wealthy/ very well insured!), Germany have 27/100,000, UK has 8/100,000.
Critical care beds/ ventilators are very expensive to run, and spending a lot of money on this high level of care reduces the amount available for outpatient / primary care that is better value for money in terms of overall morbidity and mortality.
I don't actually know the ratio of CC beds for Italy, but it doesn't matter much how well organised your health service is generally, if you can't offer respiratory support for the severely affected people then they are more likely to die. Hence all this discussion of trying to delay and reduce the peak numbers - critical care in the UK runs at around 96% bed occupancy in the winter, due to the burden of winter respiratory infections. It's a bit better than that in the summer, hence if we can delay the peak even by weeks, the availability of respiratory support will improve, and fewer people will die.