I'm looking forward to the day when the dust has settled and I can see deaths/total population. To be useful it has to run its natural course, rather than being stopped by a vaccine.
The only out way is to test everybody in a large random sample. Even South Korea doesn't do that - people volunteer or a pushed to get tested. The end result is all testing to date has been done on the parts of population who are more likely to be feeling the effects of covid-19.
That skews everything. Even "every person infects 2.3 others" becomes suspect if there is a large reservoir of people out there who have it, are infectious but don't know it. Kids in particular, being the little germ bags they are, areseemingly mostly unaffected by it and so could be a huge vector.
Counting the dead after it's over is one way to by-pass that measurement problem. In Australia, a bad flu season kills 0.015% of the population. My gut feeling is we don't as yet have any idea where covid-19 will end up. Italy is currently sitting at 0.0083%, so they aren't up to the flu levels yet. The current overwhelming of the hospitals could be caused by an extraordinarily high infection rate coupled with it being very, very mild for most people, particularly kids. Or it could because it's as horrible as the media paints it. We simply don't know.