Wrong.
In recent days, a bit of rhetoric popular at the outset of the pandemic has
reemerged among those Americans who reject calls to try to slow the virus’s spread or who are skeptical of the various vaccines that have been available for more than a year.
Maybe, they argue, experts are conflating dying of covid-19 and dying with covid-19. Maybe a lot of those 835,000 deaths are, like, a guy who died in a car crash but who also had covid at the same time. Maybe, the implication goes, covid isn’t really that big a deal after all.
As it turns out, the federal government tracks this data. It tallies the number of deaths each week, as it has for a long time. And
the data show that, since the pandemic began in early 2020, there have been hundreds of thousands more deaths than the country would have otherwise been expected to see.
...
Since Feb. 1, 2020, the country has tallied an estimated 882,000 more deaths than would have otherwise been expected. What’s more, those deaths have followed a consistent pattern: They mirror increases in the number of recorded
coronavirus infections.
We can show this clearly by comparing the number of recorded infections per state with the number of excess deaths since the pandemic began.