Also it seems that 98% of covid19 deaths have at least one comorbidity, 75% at least two. So I would expect that in many cases the virus may have just accelerated something that would have happened within a few months anyway. So you kind of need to look at how the full year death rate evolved to have an idea of the net impact of the virus.

> just accelerated something that would have happened within a few months anyway

That's absolutely not what this means. Asthma is a comorbidity. Are asthmatics just a few months from death? I have hypertension, am I about to kick the bucket? Sixty percent of the US population (no doubt including many of the posters on this very thread) are overweight, yet somehow we keep coming back.

Almost nothing kills "by itself". Everything adds up, and eventually the body stops working. Other diseases work this way too, yet you don't complain that yearly influenza deaths are inflated. Would you have argued that AIDS deaths were "really" due to the final infection and not HIV?

In fact, please cite me any of those factors which will reasonable by expected to kill you in months. Even heart failure and cancer patients tend to live years to decades with treatment.

A lot of people fall into those categories.

Here's one document from the UK that mentions the kind of testing they do to arrive at "deaths to flu" figures. They have international programmes to see what respiratory diseases are circulating, they test people who arrive in hospital for those, they know roughly how many people in the population they expect to die (because RTAs, cancer, heart disease, etc all stay sort of stable from one year to the next). They also do survey work to see if people have flu symptoms but haven't seen a doctor, and they can see how many people attend various healthcare settings for flu.

It's all a lot more complicated than "did someone write flu on a death certificate".

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...