[ceejayoz]

Which of them do you propose would cause the American public (and others worldwide; we see excess deaths increased everywhere, whether they required masking or closed schools or did very little to mitigate) to suddenly start dying in significantly higher numbers - again, of any cause - for the last two years - and especially so at the same time large COVID waves are occurring?

[flutas]

> Which of them do you propose would cause the American public (and others worldwide; we see excess deaths increased everywhere, whether they required masking or closed schools or did very little to mitigate) to suddenly start dying in significantly higher numbers - again, of any cause - for the last two years - and especially so at the same time large COVID waves are occurring?

I can give one example, which happened to my dad...

"Sorry, we have to reschedule that surgery to remove the tumor because we're anticipating a covid spike and need the bed availability."

Repeat until he died due to cancer spreading.

[ceejayoz]

That sort of thing is relatively trivial to tease out of the stats, because in addition to excess deaths we have per-disease statistics as well.

See the chart about 2/3 down on https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-continues..., titled "Average daily deaths in the United States, by cause (2020 - Present)". We don't see a massive spike in other causes of death (including cancer, which is a flat line at ~1,600/day throughout), and no one's likely to misidentify a cancer or heart attack death on a death certificate.

There are certainly cases like your dad's, where delayed screenings and treatment had individual impacts, but none of the stats available to us show this explaining a meaningful amount of the 1.3M excess deaths observed.

[hammock]

Does it matter which?

[ceejayoz]

It does if you can’t think of any that would demonstrably cause 1.3M excess deaths in the US, yes.