I provided two cites that answers this. For example, early in the pandemic, there were a rash of pneumonia deaths, more than expected. As long as that number is greater than 2, I’ve provided the data that started this sub-thread.
Your post still does not address your selection of out of date data - mine does
The new strain was already in Germany in November. It’s probably been around in the background longer so I’m not sure we can assume things are going to be radically from October.
Well, if that’s all it was, then again, my apologies. I certainly would never claim that there are zero deaths from covid that haven’t been attributed to it. (Or that there are zero deaths not from it that have been attributed to it.) I thought we were talking, particularly in the context of this thread, about whether on the whole the statistics for covid death are undercounted.
I don’t think I understand your accusation. I referred to the CDC report from October because it’s the most current report on record. I’d love nothing more, in this regard, than to see a current report and the final numbers from 2020. I do certainly, absolutely, recognize that an appraisal of pandemic loss of life that is based on a measure of excess deaths will depend, for its accuracy, on the time horizon for those excess deaths. That’s not what I was trying to get into. Not at all.
I haven’t followed this thread at all, but when it popped up this morning, I went back and read the OP from March. In it DSeid predicted 50,000 to 100,000 deaths in the USA by the end of 2020.
I’m not faulting him (obviously), just pointing out that back then we had no idea how bad this was going to get.
How about a moment of stunned silence while we let that sink in… 
As an example of the excess deaths figures consider Russia:
“Excess deaths are the difference between the total number of deaths registered and the average over the previous years for the same period. Official figures say 55,827 people have died with Covid-19 in Russia. The deputy prime minister said excess deaths would take that to 186,000.”
Russia is probably an extreme example with numbers coming from rather untrustworthy sources.
Belgium is interesting because they decided to very much err on the side of assuming covid. I’ll leave to others to crunch the numbers but it seems like their covid death count criteria left non-covid deaths within normal year expectations.
https://www.healthybelgium.be/en/health-status/mortality-and-causes-of-death/covid-19-mortality
Well, I wasn’t too far off with my minimum projection of 350K death by the end of the year. We’ve still got a bit to go but I’m still mostly comfortable with the US hitting 1mm total. I was off estimating that we’d hit a million by the end of 2020 and having this thing wrapped up. The country did a decent job over the summer suppressing the spread
I think that ijmprovements in treatment and support probably had a far greater effect.
Compare the numbers of infections against the mortality rate and it looks like those improvements decreased mortality by around 60%.
I’m sure there are many qualifiers, but fact remains, use of things such as steroids, immunosupressants and changes in the protocols for using ventilators have made a very big difference.
It is not too far off your upper limit had those improvements not taken place - and its reasonable to believe that your estimates were made prior to those changes and accounts well for your upper number.
That makes sense too. My prediction was made April 1 and a lot has changed since then. At least here in Colorado COVID was mostly under control thought the summer so I attributed that nationwide but I remember other places didn’t do as well.
I think it far more likely that’s mostly an artifact of different testing levels. The hospitalization-infection rate wouldn’t change that much with better treatment. I think if we had the same testing back in May, case numbers would have been double or triple the numbers now.
Related:
One interesting this about this thread is that we all thought a year was the timeline. I have no idea why we thought that.