Why not the fact that perhaps the virus found its way in more vulnerable populations, such as hospitals and nursing care homes (44% of the current deaths)?

If that happened, the population would be very largely skewed towards the most vulnerable (you usually don't go to ER or a hospital if you're healthy) and that would explain the uptick in deaths.

There's no other idea I can offer to explain why a disease with an estimated IFR between 0.5 and 0.9% would cause an order of magnitude more deaths.