Well, in France for instance, this ICU specialist says that 3 patients out of 8 he saw going through the ICU are classified as covid patients because they tested positive but are not in ICU for Covid [1, around 18min into the video]. Now this is one ICU, and not all deaths occur in ICUs, so I wouldn't extrapolate it to national numbers. But it certainly makes me think that covid deaths are over-estimated.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1hOyShXHak

Just because they're tested positive for Covid and later die in the hospital, doesn't mean that the death certificate will state Covid as cause of death.

That may be but it's not necessarily how the covid deaths stats are collected. I believe in the UK for instance, the definition of a covid death is a death that occurred within 28 days of a positive test, irrespective of the cause of death.

There's not one way to collect these stats, see the section "ONS and PHE COVID-19 deaths data are produced in different ways and have different purposes:" in [0] on what the UK gathers how. Neither of which changes the excess deaths resulting from the pandemic.

It's just a matter of timeliness in some cases and up to the consumer of such data to decide which is suitable for which analysis (and honestly a moot point, no country tests enough to warrant the assumption that the odd accidental death that is later corrected would be worse than the effects of undercounting).

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

Excess death data clearly shows this is not a big factor: https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2021/01/15/covid-19-en-f...

Dude is also a known antivax: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpxwx/how-france-became-the...

Not too surprising when you see where he works ;-).