Those death figures are not deaths from COVID. They are deaths of any cause within 28 days of a positive test, and thus over-count, especially when the elderly

Those death figures are not deaths from COVID. They are deaths of any cause within 28 days of a positive test, and thus over-count, especially when the elderly who are (to put it coldly) "scheduled" to die get a positive test and then die "on time". It makes the COVID death stats useless because what's actually interesting is not how many people die in vague proximity to a positive result on a trigger-happy test, but rather how many people could have been meaningfully saved. Life years lost, in other words.