Two different ideas are being conflated here. One is the OP's idea, "deaths due to COVID". This idea is "how many people would have died if COVID had never exi

Two different ideas are being conflated here. One is the OP's idea, "deaths due to COVID". This idea is "how many people would have died if COVID had never existed". However, what a lot of people hear when you say "deaths due to COVID" is "this is the number of people that died as either a direct or indirect result of having COVID in their system". But that is not the 900,000 number being cited. It is made even worse by the HN headline, which is "death toll from COVID", which even more strongly implies the above.