"Hundreds of thousands" according to an organization (the CDC) that has strong incentives to inflate the numbers, sourced from a disparate collection of doctors and hospitals that also have incentives to inflate the numbers, using squishy metrics for whether the death was caused by COVID or not.
Nobody sane thinks that a lot of people haven't died from COVID - but it should be common sense that you should be careful when an organization or individual has an incentive to alter data.
As to GP's main point, separately from whether the official numbers are correct, there are ways that you can take the same data and "spin" it - the "blindly catastrophizing" mentioned. For instance, using "six hundred thousand" - the official number of all-time deaths - instead of the number of yearly deaths. You can also tactfully omit contextual information - for instance, COVID was the third leading cause of death in the US for 2020[1], making up only about 11% of the total, and close to half of the next leading cause, cancer (345k vs. 598k).
Regardless of the numbers, how do you explain the unprecedented strain on healthcare systems? When was the last time hospitals requested refrigerated trucks for storing bodies?[1] When was the last time that states had to ration care under crisis standards?[2]
Nobody sane thinks that a lot of people haven't died from COVID - but it should be common sense that you should be careful when an organization or individual has an incentive to alter data.
As to GP's main point, separately from whether the official numbers are correct, there are ways that you can take the same data and "spin" it - the "blindly catastrophizing" mentioned. For instance, using "six hundred thousand" - the official number of all-time deaths - instead of the number of yearly deaths. You can also tactfully omit contextual information - for instance, COVID was the third leading cause of death in the US for 2020[1], making up only about 11% of the total, and close to half of the next leading cause, cancer (345k vs. 598k).
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234