The range was from 500k to 1.2 million if elimination failed, at least in the early estimates I saw. Early in the pandemic, we were woefully underprepared with care - you can see how the death proportion has changed with time.

If we had let the pandemic spread in normal course early on, I suspect we would have seen many more deaths.

I think it is way too easy to look back and say that we had as many deaths as we would have had doing nothing.