Cool, this has already got me thinking and looking up different things.
@Homestar - Infection rates is a known number, it looks like it's expressed as the basic reproduction number, R0. CDC has the current best estimate as 2.5. The wikipedia article has it as 2-6, but the sources are from papers in July, whereas the CDC's page was updated in September. For reference the common cold has an R0 of about 2-3 from the wikipedia page, and seasonal strains of influenza are listed as 0.9-2.1. As far as morbidity, the Swedish doctor I linked to before seems to have concluded that it's about on par with the flu. It seems to me that the tremendous effect on the country comes largely from our response to it. This is an area where I should do more research: the main group at risk of dying from COVID is also at risk from rhinoviruses such as the common cold. In a normal cold and flu season, how is this handled to keep elderly patients safe? And while I lack a linked source right now, from talking to people that I know that work in hospitals it is standard ops for the ICU to be around 80-90% capacity because anything else would not be profitable. Now obviously this gets difficult if you need to keep a separate "COVID ICU," but then again that is our response to the virus.
@N730 On the topic of reinfection, I have not seen too many things about that, and the CDC at least seems to think it's rare. I'd like to see more data on this (if you have some that'd be awesome), especially numbers. One of the things that I've noticed surrounding this whole thing is we are given a lot of large numbers with very little context. The town I'm in posts new cases daily and deaths daily on facebook. What if the same were to happen with the flu, or the cold, or even car accidents? Reinfection numbers would shed light on whether it's enough to make herd immunity unlikely.
@ThreeHoler on long term effects, again most sources say this is rare (but I haven't really seen numbers), and really the virus hasn't been around too long (someone I know had a bad bout of the flu in January and it took her until March-April to regain her lung capacity), so how much can we really know about this. Further, is it worth keeping a lot of people at home and unemployed? I do want to do more research on where the social distancing thing came from, but if you look into how far a sneeze can travel, I wonder how effective that really is. As far as masks, I'll link that Swedish doctor again (in that article he looks into pre-covid studies about decreasing the spread of raspatory infections), but people seem to regard them as a magical forcefield or something which they do not seem to be.