One useful thing we can all do on FR is to dig out data and make it more available. That helps others since FR gets indexed by search engines fairly frequently.
The apparent need for large numbers of ventilators in areas where COVID-19 outbreaks occur, and the extent to which public health organizations seem concerned with the availability of ventilators suggests that either they are being used at a higher rate for COVID-19 patients, or the COVID-19 caseload is much more concentrated in time than for influenza outbreaks, or the public health people are incompetent. The latter seems unlikely as a first order explanation, since they are being guided by the same organization that published the paper you provided, and most of them participated in an August 2019 exercise related to pandemic preparedness.
The only data value which appears to be different between the influenza modeling and the reported COVID-19 data is the rate of hospitalizations relative to illnesses. But that data is of course very hard to know early in an epidemic. Some Chinese papers suggest a higher hospitalization ratio for COVID-19, which would if applied to the Huang models increase the ventilator usage substantially.
I cannot recall at what point you entered this conversation.
In any event, this whole issue started when I pointed out to someone that during New York City's peak influenza week, they had 4,000 influenza patients in the hospital, and NO ONE was panicking about enough ventilators.
Since NYC has 30,000 of the USA’s 120,000 COVID-19 infections, and since infections are surging ONLY in NYC, there should be no problem getting ventilators from the rest of the country to NYC, if, in fact, they actually need them.
Instead, Trump wants to build 100,000 new ventilators, which is absolutely crazy.