I don't know what fancy stats the economist does (and I don't trust fancy stats), but I looked at the french stats [1] recently and my back of the envelope appr

I don't know what fancy stats the economist does (and I don't trust fancy stats), but I looked at the french stats [1] recently and my back of the envelope approach [2] suggest 50k excess deaths. There was 55.7k more deaths in 2020 vs 2019 (which didn't seem to be an extraordinary year). Over a 25y period, the number of deaths increases by 3.4k every year on average (population growth). The number of cumulative covid deaths in france is 109k, of which 65k to the 1st of Jan 2021 [3]. So the excess deaths seem to be in line with covid deaths. Now you could get a very different result for another country depending on how well covid deaths are reported. Also difficult to predict how this will look like in 2021. Covid deaths seem to be predominantly people near their end of life, but on the other hand the delay of lots of medical procedures as the result of the lockdown should have its own excess death, plus impact of change in crime, accidents, increase in poverty, etc. God knows what will be the net effect of all this. [1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2383440 https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2383440 [2] https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/excessdeathfr.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/excessdeathfr.... [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103422/coronavirus-france-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103422/coronavirus-fran...