Excess deaths includes deaths that were directly attributable due to other causes, but may still be indirectly caused by COVID. Suppose I were to break into a dialysis clinic and abscond with half the equipment. If this is an isolated incident, then patients can be sent to other clinics, or dialysis machines brought in. But suppose I were to break into every dialysis clinic and steal half the equipment. In that case, there's no surplus that can be shuffled around, and people would die. The direct cause of death would still be kidney failure, but I would have been the indirect cause.
In the same way, COVID puts pressure on the hospital system as a whole. Nurses who could have been monitoring a post-surgery recovery are instead monitoring ventilators in the COVID wing, or are quarantined after being exposed. The crash cart arrives a little bit slower to a heart attack, because the closest one was already in use. If the available nurses are on longer shifts, that contributes to sleep deprivation, making it easy to miss details that would otherwise have been caught.
This is true across all age groups. As of September, while COVID had 4.6 million direct fatalities, there had been 15 million excess deaths. Determining the final scope of COVID will be a matter of long research, and certainly isn't something that can be resolved in a short internet argument. Dismissing it as "Seems unlikely." when not even comparing between the same same type of measurement seems premature.
In the same way, COVID puts pressure on the hospital system as a whole. Nurses who could have been monitoring a post-surgery recovery are instead monitoring ventilators in the COVID wing, or are quarantined after being exposed. The crash cart arrives a little bit slower to a heart attack, because the closest one was already in use. If the available nurses are on longer shifts, that contributes to sleep deprivation, making it easy to miss details that would otherwise have been caught.
This is true across all age groups. As of September, while COVID had 4.6 million direct fatalities, there had been 15 million excess deaths. Determining the final scope of COVID will be a matter of long research, and certainly isn't something that can be resolved in a short internet argument. Dismissing it as "Seems unlikely." when not even comparing between the same same type of measurement seems premature.
[0] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/econ-s06.html