This assumes that official COVID deaths are undercounted but takes earlier pandemic death numbers at face value. That seems counterintuitive. Surely more deaths

This assumes that official COVID deaths are undercounted but takes earlier pandemic death numbers at face value. That seems counterintuitive. Surely more deaths are counted now that we have more hospitals and better tracking and more countries have universal healthcare? I'm also extremely skeptical of excess deaths as a figure, but that's beside the point, since - again - there's nothing to compare it to, so it would still be useless even if it were a valid way to estimate COVID deaths.