In that the people who are already dead won't die again? Since they will no longer be counted I would expect numbers to simply return to average among those left living. I doubt the survivors are extra healthy or less susceptible to the normal causes of death.

No, as in those that were going to die in the future, will no longer die in the future. Returning to the average doesn't make sense. There's a fixed amount of deaths that have to be spread across the timeline somehow and logic would tell us that lots of early deaths (concentrated very heavily in the elderly range of the age distribution) will necessarily subtract from the future. Of course there's a ton of other variables at play that could hide this reality.

That's not how the math works though. The people who are dead brought the average down because they died at a younger age. The only way to compensate for that would be if those left alive live longer than average. There is no reason to expect that to happen.

It seems to me like I'm arguing the instantaneous rate of death will be lower afterwards, since there's a swath of elderly people missing from the population, but you're arguing about the average reverting over time (and specifically that it won't revert from the impact of the pandemic). I don't think the premature death impact of covid will be that large compared to, say, obesity or diabetes. So the impact on the average won't be severe & could be easily offset if our public health leaders produced actual positive results. Instead we've got an unhealthy population and no one accepts the blame.

COIVD killed and kills mostly the aged, infirm, obese, or otherwise health compromised people. So the survivors are more healthy than average and less susceptible to normal causes of death.

That makes sense and should have a smallish effect. But to compensate for such a large and sudden drop in life expectancy wouldn't the survivors need to be exceptionally more healthy than average and live significantly longer? That's surely not going to happen in two years either. So what I would expect is a very slow reversion back to average, with maybe a slight bump above average in ten years or more.

>people who are already dead won't die again?

Oh look, another chronic-death denier

As we keep learning more about long Covid, I expect that even if we stopped transmission of the virus today we’d still be seeing excess death and shorter lifespans for a long time. There are a lot of people walking around unaware of the organ damage they are living with due to minor bouts of Covid. Since the effects with subsequent infections seem to be cumulative, and more and more people getting repeated infections the next couple of decades are going to be a massacre with deaths from several different causes going up as people start to succumb to the effects of long Covid.

Completely uneducated opinion, but probably not. By participating on Reddit's Herman Cain Award subreddit, one of the themes is that survivors from advanced infections don't die outright, but are left with lifetime illnesses. I can't help but think that these long haulers, who weren't in the best health to begin with, are going to survive over the next 5 years.

These excess deaths occurred over a period of two or three years. The subsequent deficit will be spread over perhaps 30 years so it would be around 1/10th as much.