It may be that, in October, the worst-case scenario was over-emphasised instead of a more reasonable scenario, but the fact remains that the second wave has so far accounted for in the region of 20,000 lives, and an excess mortality of around 15%-20%, which is still a lot.
It's also more or less inevitable, now, that we ended the second lockdown too early for it to have had enough of an effect. The average daily death toll (seven-day rolling average of announced deaths) from Covid in the UK has hovered between 400-470 since around November 10th (peak: 467 on the 24th), and is set to rise from that.
Continuing to downplay the threat that Covid places is going to cost yet more lives. We have to hope that people are sensible over Christmas, otherwise the brief respite will sadly have a deadly cost for some families, more than was necessary, over the coming couple of months. The undoubted benefits from the vaccine simply won't come fast enough to prevent this.