Agreed, just read a good response to this from JD Vance:
"There’s a way in which this claim is sort of interesting as an academic argument: effectively, how do we track deaths in an accelerating pandemic, where it isn’t possible to test everyone who’s dying?
A lot of folks have picked up on CDC guidelines that don’t require a test to confirm a case of COVID. Others have focused on the “with/or” question—just because someone dies *with* COVID doesn’t mean that’s the cause of mortality. A few responses.
First, people are right to say the situation is fluid and it’s tough to record every death accurately. But importantly, 1) this is true for every disease (do you think every flu death has a confirmed flu test? No, just check the CDC guidelines) and 2) miscounting goes both ways.
There’s a lot of reason to think we’re undercounting deaths. First, it has happened in nearly every major European country. NYC public health officials have argued that where normally 20-25 people die per day at home, that number has been higher than 200 as the crisis has peaked.
But the truth is that we won’t know until we can look at the all cause mortality numbers, and see how they’ve spiked or not in response to COVID. (To be clear, I have some qualms with how useful the all cause numbers will be here, but they’re probably the best we’ll have.)
Many have argued that all cause mortality numbers are dropping lately (can’t find the tweets). This is wrong: CDC usually takes months to fully tabulate the data. There’s been a lot of misinformation here—a suggestion that pneumonia deaths are dropping because health officials are overstating COVID numbers, for instance, is widespread on twitter. All of this stems from the fact that our mortality numbers don’t fully come in for months. One exception here is NYC, which usually reports vital statistics rapidly (and has done so for many years).
Finally, I think the “with/or” debate misunderstands something pretty fundamental about comorbidity. Most people who die of a respiratory illness (including, yes, the flu) aren’t totally healthy people. If a dude with a heart condition gets the flu and dies, but would have lived another 10 months absent influenza, did he die of the flu? This **** is complicated, but that doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy to inflate COVID deaths."