in case you've heard that covid deaths are inflated,
let's look at deaths from all causes...

# to start from zero, run at the commandline: 
# pip install jupyterlab numpy pandas matplotlib sodapy

# external dependencies

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sodapy import Socrata

use_dark_background = 0
if use_dark_background:
    plt.style.use('dark_background')
else:
    plt.style.use('default')

Many more people died (of all causes) in 2020 than in recent 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?

Covid deaths correlate pretty well with excess deaths, but don't peak as high--covid deaths seem to be tracking total excess deaths more closely toward year's end. To understand why covid deaths exceeded excess deaths during Mar-May 2021, we next add other major natural causes of death.