I don’t believe the overwhelmed hospitals in South Dakota and El Passo, Texas, including the prisoners sequestered to move the dead bodies into refrigerated trucks, consider it hype. I guess COVID-19 will disappear after Inauguration Day like it was going to disappear after the “heat started up in April.”
Except that the examples you're giving are, in fact, the hype.
"Overwhelmed hospitals" is said to make it sound as though a plague is among us and hospitals can't handle all of the ill. Instead, hospitals are purposely admitting more people - admittance is up because hospitals have chosen to change their policies and are admitting people they wouldn't have admitted who came in with similar symptoms last year. And if you look at the turnover, they're keeping people just long enough to call them admitted patients and not just ER or treated patients. They get money for that.
"Moving dead bodies into refrigerated trucks" sounds quite chilling and is used to sell fear. What they're not telling you is that it's not a direct result of deaths piling up but, instead, a result of a compilation of things. All of those bodies are waiting for autopsy - they wouldn't ordinarily autopsy every death so the morgues aren't designed to hold that capacity. Also, since people who died with a positive COVID test have to be handled differently, there's a backlog before they can get them to the funeral home. So, if a person dies of pneumonia, for example, and was negative for COVID, they're dealt with straight away. But if they tested positive for COVID, they have to body bag them (plus the autopsy) and handle them differently, which isn't the normal procedure. All of the extra COVID procedures, simply because someone tested positive, creates the appearance of mounting deaths and bodies piling up.
You can't look at hospitalizations or positive cases as an indicator since those numbers are just kind of garbage data. What you can use is ICU admittance for COVID and deaths caused by COVID and both of those data show that the rest is hype.