It seems reasonable to create a statistical analysis based on years of expected life lost -- but that still doesn't mean people aren't dying from Covid19.

Aside, slightly tangential: Back in Feb/March BMJ had some controversy about UK government hiding excess Winter deaths in flu statistics. The implication being that the gov were taking more deaths over Winter and saying it was flu when in fact the deaths were more related to poverty (no heating, little food). Next thing we know people are saying Covid19 want a problem because it wasn't even as bad as flu (though at the time is was killing far more people as a proportion of those infected). Lies and statistics, and all that.

I don't think this is what they're saying. I think the point is that those people's actual times of death weren't far enough from their expected times of death given their preexisting conditions to be able to confidently say that they died of Covid, rather than just having died with it. In other words, that there's a good chance they would have died at the exact same time even without Covid.

Presumably you think doctors have always been lying about cause of death? What do you think their motivation for that is?

They still died of CoVID-19. A lot of people have heart disease, or diabetes, or are overweight, or have any number of other conditions. If they get CoVID-19 and die, you can't just write that off because they were overweight.

If you look at the official statistics for the whole country right now, 26% of all dead where 90 years or older, and 41% 80-89 years old. Most of them weren't just a bit out of shape, they were already sick.

If I were a betting man, based on these numbers, I'd put my money on excess mortality once everything's been tallied, at least in that county.

[1] https://www.scb.se/en/About-us/news-and-press-releases/exces...