[jsnell]

"It" refers to what you wrote, i.e. "Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths."

That theory is obviously not compatible with the excess mortality graphs moving in lockstep with the Covid death graphs. If the virus has no correlation with deaths and it is all a mis-attribution, why would the pattern of deaths match so well with the pattern of excess mortality?

Excess mortality being a model rather than ground truth is irrelevant too. It still doesn't explain the correlation.

[native_samples]

Ah. I didn't mean that SARS-CoV-2 is literally an inert virus. Clearly it's not at all, it's a virus that has caused quite a bit of death, and indeed, the mortality graphs are the best evidence of that.

The claim about an inert virus was an extreme example to make the point clearer. Imagine such a virus did exist (which it doesn't). Then by the methodology used to compute COVID deaths, there would still be a large number of deaths attributed to the virus even as excess deaths didn't move at all, even though that should be a statistical impossibility.

The question is therefore not "is SARS-CoV-2 entirely inert", obviously that would be ridiculous. The question is "to what extent are the reported numbers confounded by age and co-morbidity effects". The Economist is arguing that excess death figures show the confounding doesn't exist or must be so small it hardly matters. I'm arguing that by their own data (which seems to be continuously updated even long after the article is published?) there are countries where either the numbers are over-counted in this way, or the mortality models are seriously wrong, because COVID deaths > excess deaths.