They claim COVID led to behavioral changes that lowered the expected volume of death, so the naive excess mortality is an undercount: > Overall, the evidence s

They claim COVID led to behavioral changes that lowered the expected volume of death, so the naive excess mortality is an undercount: > Overall, the evidence suggests reductions of 615,000 deaths, or potentially more, stemming from behavioral changes at the global level. The main potential increases in excess mortality due to deferred care and increases in drug overdose and depression are hard to quantify at this point or are of a much smaller magnitude. Given that there is insufficient evidence to estimate these contributions to excess mortality, for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality So basically they lowered the expected number of deaths, then claimed all deaths above expectation are COVID.