Any discussion about COVID eventually devolves to death.
In the beginning, a lot of morons were predicting 2-3,000,000 US deaths from COVID. They were, in many instances, smart people who extrapolated very sketchy data to absurd conclusions. I don’t think they intended to mislead, but many of them were alarmists.
That obviously did not happen.
I also heard a lot of folks who said things like:
“Total deaths in the US went down during the time of COVID.”
“Every death is being characterized as COVID related because of funding implications.”
You undoubtedly heard many of the same utterances. So, I decided to do some actual research and here is what I found:
You may have to select and click on the chart to be able to read it. I wanted to see the trend line, so I used 2015 – 2020 to lay it bare.
Here is what I learned:
1. US deaths did NOT decline during 2020.
2. Deaths increased by an abnormally high number, some 503,976 of which 345,323 were attributed to COVID.
3. Most categories went up, some slightly, some more.
4. Cancer stayed virtually constant which seems a good arithmetic check on the nature of the numbers.
5. Suicide went down, which surprises me given the nature of the discourse in the public square.
These numbers disregard the increasing population during the the time period 2015 – 2020 which was about 10,000,000 persons.
So, the bottom line is that we had a slight increase in deaths from all sources — 503,976 — of which 345,323 in 2020 were attributed to COVID, leaving us with a total increase of 158,653 in a rising population (about 2,000,000 a year).
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. Be well and don’t become one of the statistics during 2021. 
Eat healthy.