I thought he was saying that it was all a big drama and more people would die by worrying about it rather than with it, its tiny compared with the flu which was the line at the time. So the facilities were never going to be needed.
Or conversely the modelling has been shit and if we locked down a couple of weeks later when the R had gone from 3.5 to something much higher the hospitals could have been overwhelmed and we would have got a far better bang for buck out of the temporary facilities.