You're not wrong. The original article is. The cited paper makes an apples-to-oranges comparison. The 2017 figure (~400k) is an estimate of excess deaths in th

You're not wrong. The original article is. The cited paper makes an apples-to-oranges comparison. The 2017 figure (~400k) is an estimate of excess deaths in the US compared to age-specific death rates of an average of five European countries. The 2020 number is the CDC estimate of coronavirus deaths (~375k). In any case, this is considerably smaller than the overall excess mortality (from the US baseline, not a comparison to Europe), which is estimated at 522k (and doesn't count the first two months of the year)[1]. In this comment, I only point out verifiable facts. People can come to their own conclusion about the extent to which the original article makes good faith or bad faith arguments based on citations to the literature. [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361