There must be some sort of "flushing the pipeline" effect involved, provided that the virus kills the vulnerable to some extent. So I wonder how that will affect the numbers in the near future.

My guess is it will slip to slightly below the norm after the pandemic has passed. There are still a lot of people dying that had many years of life ahead of them.

of course everyone has to die at a certain point, when does make a difference and COVID is making a HUGE difference as you can see by the spike in mortality rate