I just don't understand where they got such high excess death numbers in the first place. Fitting a sinusoid with a 52 week perios and adding a slope for population growth you can get a very good (R=99.xx) fit up until the pandemic. Using that ramped sinusoid the excess death number comes out about 50k over the reported covid totals.

Edit: data source is cdc total mortality page. Going back to 2014