France reports nearly half a million new Covid cases, a record increase

That site reports weekly excess death numbers for most of Europe and Israel as well. Excess death appears to be defined not as excess from an average year, but as excess from an average period where there are no flu or other diseases circulating. This makes sense because the goal of collecting these data is to know quickly whether there are breakouts of diseases, and thus the baseline must be "a typical year without flu" rather than "a typical year". Thus, the numbers give you some idea of the impact of covid compared with the flu, at least in terms of deaths. Occasionally you can see other phenomena such as the impact of heat waves in the summer. I understand that the baseline is adjusted for population growth.

In the area covered it looks like there are about 70000 baseline deaths per week, or roughly 3.5M deaths for a year. There were about 100K excess deaths in 2017 and 2019, about 160K excess deaths in 2018, 400K in 2020 and 350K in 2021. Eyeballing, the current wave seems to be comparable to the 2017-2018 winter episode.

I find the graphs by age very interesting, especially the 0-14 range.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=FRA