The study I got these numbers from doesn't seem to classify asthma or obesity as a comorbidity. The largest ones are hypertension, diabetes, ischemic heart disease, atrial fibrilation, active cancer in past 5y, heart failure, COPD, dementia, stroke and chronic liver disease. Not familiar with all items in this list but some seem pretty serious.
So you think that stroke victims and retirees with dementia are just months from the grave? FWIW: I've personally been living with diagnosed atrial fibrilation for almost three decades. Diabetes is, literally, a lifelong illness for its sufferers.
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.
Of the people who died of this virus, yes, it is likely that a not insignificant percentage were in pretty bad shape. We are not talking about the whole population who have these comorbidities in the country.
This shows the full list of conditions that are high risk:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/if-yo...
A lot of people fall into those categories.
> 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?