To further underline what you're saying is both true and OK; once they started doing that, death tallies started at least getting close to excess deaths, althou

To further underline what you're saying is both true and OK; once they started doing that, death tallies started at least getting close to excess deaths, although (IIRC, and I might have misremembered) despite diagnosing covid without PCR, excess deaths always exceeded diagnosed cases - i.e. almost certainly the doctors etc were being fairly conservative. (Although they didn't try to diagnose people that died before even reaching the hospital, which were thousands - and would have contributed to excess deaths, but not covid numbers).