The US doesn't have high quality national excess death data, apparently. That's surprising. Part of the distorted response to this outbreak is because most countries only seem to publish relatively recent excess death data - often only a few years. But when longer term data is examined it shows that there have been plenty of flu seasons with similar death rates. That's why people keep comparing it to the flu.

At a national level the peak in the USA was at 20,000 excess deaths. In 2017 the peak was at about 7,000

(https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/cdc-releases-detailed-nat...)

So it must be much worse, right?

Well, not really. If you look at the longer term data for a hard-hit country like the UK, where there are a lot of lockdown-created excess deaths due to excessively underloading the hospitals:

http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/

You can see that this outbreak had at the end of April an almost identical number of excess deaths so far this year to 2017, 1999 (which was worse), 1998, 1996 and 1995.

It seems flu care might have got better over time, or perhaps vaccinations had the impact. But so far the impact on COVID on the UK is not much different to disease outbreaks throughout the 1990s.

The UK stats will go up and it'll be worse than any other outbreak for sure, because at this point the population is in a state of fear and avoiding hospitals - even if they don't want to, critical treatments for other diseases have been cancelled to free up space for a surge that never came.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/27/care-homes-see-r...

"UK's biggest provider says deaths among residents at three times last year's rate, but only half of additional deaths linked to virus"

And this is with almost any death being ascribed to COVID, without requiring tests or evidence. The lockdown will claim more lives than COVID will.

talk about ridiculous claims.

However this is only really in over 60s

The explanations would be

1) more covid deaths than have been mentioned on death certificate 2) more deaths from other reasons

I haven’t seen any detailed breakdown of cause of death other than “covid mentioned” (and thus not mentioned)

What a rubbish site. Its first argument is that deaths are not worse than 2018, so its not bad. Even though you can see that number of deaths quickly surpasses 2018 in 2-3 weeks and rises a lot higher faster, while it started a lot lower.

It's third argument is even more ridiculous. "Look at this graph showing a strong correlation between lockdown stringency and infection cases, stringent lockdowns increase infections!" is akin to saying people should stop using umbrellas because they increase rain.

(Also that graph is useless because the number of cases is not normalized inhabitants per inhabitants, so its x axis is bad)