As to focus on mortality referred to above by Clark, these are some considerations:
1. The overall infection mortality rate has been estimated as between 0.2% and 1% in large series. In fact the mortality groups is much higher, at almost 10% in those above the age of 70. In fact the existence of co-morbidities, another risk factor is also very prevalent in that age group. Take GB for example, there are about 3.1 million above the age of 80 years and 4.5 millions between 70 and 79 years of age. Then there are about 5 million diabetics and also about 15-20 % of the populations are obese. These figures mean that the at risk groups are approaching a third of the population and all these risk groups have a mortality in excess of 1% and in some cases perhaps several percent points.
2. As also pointed out morbidity is an extremely important factor. With each wave there is an increase in hospital admissions and admissions to hospital as the denominator which will indicate how saturated NHS capacity is. The Guardian publishes daily figures in a dashboard together with weekly increments of daily number of cases, hospital inpatients, and deaths, but no denominator for hospital beds. The number of general hospital beds in UK is about 106,000 which suggests that about twenty percent of hospital beds are now occupied by patients with Covid 19. There is also a high percentage of bed occupancy which is near capacity often and leads to the usual winter bed crisis. These factors are not much talked about by those who wish to ignore the impact of Covid 19.
3. There also long term effects as mentioned above.
4. The impact of milder cases especially amongst frontline workers would also have an impact on services and the economy.