We jcan get a pretty good estimate, however. There are hundreds of thousands more people who have died in the US this past year than recent years. This is due to COVID. There are other things that contributed to it, but nothing that can explain this increase like COVID. Flu deaths have decreased, because all the evidence-based epidemiological actions that decrease the r- value of COVID have the same effect on other respiratory illnesses with the same mechanism of transmission. Suicides have went up. School shootings have went down tremendously (can't hurt someone through a laptop). Of course, flu deaths are orders or magnitude higher than school shootings each year, but a virus no one had immunity toward, for which treatment protocols were not advanced or standardized, with a national infrastructure unable to cope with ICUs being at a high capacity, creates a situation in which the death rate is orders of magnitude higher than can be explained by either of those or other causes. Furthermore, the quality of life of those who go on a respirator and manage to survive is often much worse than prior to contacting the virus.
Post-COVID lungs worse than the worst smokers' lungs, surgeon says - CBS News Think of the comparison between someone who strength trains in their 70s and someone who doesn't. A similar difference in quality of life is seen in those who get exhausted putting on their socks and shoes in the morning because their lung function is so vastly decreased.
And all those people, many of whom are out of work both due to some degree of necessary (albeit often overzealous) governmental response as well as simply reduced demand, have medical bills to pay when they get discharged from the ICU. Many of those who lost their health insurance that was tied to their ability to maintain employment in the worst economic situation since the great depression now have to pay for it on their own.
The net effects of this virus are not only deaths, which can definitely be measured scientifically in an indirect way, but also poor health outcomes, drained bank accounts, and more meager existences for those who have to suffer through it.