It's not clear to me the total deaths number is accurate in the US because the government was reimbursing hospitals for COVID treatment and paying for people's funerals who "died of covid". It incentivized people to list the cause of death as COVID even when covid didn't play a role in the death or was at best incidental to it.

Anecdotally this happened with the father of a friend of mine. He had cancer since before the pandemic and it became terminal after exhausting treatment options last year. As his condition deteriorated, they planned to move him to hospice, did a routine covid test and found he was positive. He died a few days later. He was going to die of cancer in days no matter what. He is counted among the million US covid deaths and the US government paid for a portion of the cost of the funeral.

What percentage of that million are cases like this? I don't know, but it is pretty clear it wasn't uncommon and in the context of your original comment I wouldn't call cases like this preventable deaths.

Look up excess deaths

Excess deaths could just have easily been caused by people postponing medical care for other conditions. Hospitals were canceling elective procedures for example.

You act like excess deaths is an easy analysis, but deaths vary significantly year or year. What you baseline are makes a big difference.

And considering we’re not even through the epidemic it seems like it’s a bit early to call winners and losers.

Nonsense. There are various reasonable ways to calculate a baseline and they all show large surges over the covid period (which correspond to reported covid deaths, btw).

Also, there are no winners, what are you even talking about?

Do you average deaths over the past 5 years? Or 10 years? How do you correct for population growth? How about age distribution? What if you had a flu pandemic and deaths were 5% higher 3 years? Correct for that or not?

> the government was reimbursing hospitals for COVID treatment

That's how all of medicare works.

I can't believe people have been regurgitating this talking point since the beginning of the pandemic with no thought whatsoever about what it means

They specifically boosted what Medicare paid for COVID treatment by 20% during the public health emergency.

This article has a good overview of the exact terms of the extra 20% payments made by Medicare.

https://www.hfma.org/topics/news/2020/04/increased-medicare-...

and? do you have any proof of your claim that "It incentivized people to list the cause of death as COVID even when covid didn't play a role in the death or was at best incidental to it"? Are you saying doctors are personally getting some sort of kickback?

Besides my direct experience? It doesn’t require fraud this is the result of the loose requirements to get reimbursed under these temporary measures and the fact that COVID tests are a routine part of hospital admissions. For example to be reimbursed for funeral costs COVID only need be listed as a contributing cause and doesn’t need to be the primary cause of death.

so you have no evidence.

How much influence do you think what you are mentioning has had on the numbers and what is your proof of that?