[esoterica]

Do you think it's likely that 26,000 people happened to get hit by a bus right after getting diagnosed with the coronavirus?

4% of the patients diagnosed with coronavirus in the US have already died (and many more of the currently diagnosed patients are still sick and have not yet died but will in the future). It's wildly implausible that a meaningful fraction of 4% of that sample could have coincidentally died within a few weeks of getting diagnosed with the coronavirus, but for entirely unrelated reasons. If 4% of the population were dying every few weeks, humanity would be virtually extinct within a few years. Your "stat-padding" theory doesn't pass a basic smell test.

You can construct far-fetched pathological scenarios for how 1 or 2 people might be wrongly identified as coronavirus victims, but you can't explain away 26k deaths with baseless conspiracy theories.

[s1artibartfast]

2.8 million Americans die in a normal year, or about 7,500/day.

The risk factors for normal causes of death are basically identical to those of covid-19 ( age, vascular disease, cancer, respiratory disease, ect). I think it is reasonable to wonder how many of the people who died from covid-19 were already loosing a battle with pre-existing condition.