The Economist graph shows "covid-19 excess deaths". The article is about "September 2020 least deadly month ((...)) 2020 third least deadly year ever so far".

The Economist graph shows "covid-19 excess deaths". The article is about "September 2020 least deadly month ((...)) 2020 third least deadly year ever so far". AFAIK there is no normalized way to count COVID-19-induced deaths. If so there is no way to compare official "COVID-19-induced deaths", because a given case may be counted as such in a country and not in another one, or even in the same nation by a given doctor and not by another one. The total amount of deaths seems more objective. Moreover the pandemics is running, therefore any comparison offers only a peek on a fraction of the challenge. Isn't this "herd immunity" approach a sort of "let's endure more short-term deaths, then durably much less afterwards" bet? In such a case any accounting may be moot for years.