Many more people died (of all causes) in 2020 and 2021 than in previous years. But how many deaths might be due to covid, rather than say suicide or overdose? Next we look at deaths from all natural causes.
We see much higher weekly deaths from natural causes since week 12 of 2020. How many more people are dying than we would expect? For "excess deaths" we simply use 2019 as our baseline and subtract the deaths in 2019 from those in 2020.
How many of these excess deaths were officially attributed to covid?
Excess deaths are greater than covid deaths except around March 2021. The two curves correlate fairly well.
As a sanity check, let's sum all the individual natural causes of death and compare it with the total that we've been using: