> They subtract COVID deaths from excess deaths to get the baseline, forgetting that COVID deaths were counted somewhat liberally, and some percentage of non-COVID deaths were counted as COVID deaths if someone was infected close to their time of death.
If COVID deaths were counted liberaly and even after subtracting those inflated numbers you still have excess deaths, then that only further underlines their point that these excess deaths are not COVID-related.
Just because you think the criteria for counting COVID deaths were wrong doesn't make every conclusion based on those numbers incorrect.
No, they say that current non-COVID excess deaths are higher than non-COVID excess deaths were during COVID. They underestimate non-COVID excess deaths during COVID because of the subtraction, which makes current excess deaths higher than average. In reality, they underestimated the average that they compare to. Hope it's clear now.
I see what you mean, yes it does make it difficult to prove a trend between periods with high rates of COVID infection and low rates of COVID infection.
But proving such a trend is problematic regardless of what the criteria for a COVID excess death is. Simply because during a period of high COVID infection a lot of people are dying from COVID before they have the chance to die from other causes.
However, Covid preys heavily on the already sick. We should see a *reduction* in deaths because Covid killed off a lot of people that didn't have a lot of time left. We don't even have an accurate baseline to compare to at this point.
If COVID deaths were counted liberaly and even after subtracting those inflated numbers you still have excess deaths, then that only further underlines their point that these excess deaths are not COVID-related.
Just because you think the criteria for counting COVID deaths were wrong doesn't make every conclusion based on those numbers incorrect.