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?