17% excess mortality (and that’s assuming this 1% baseline we pulled out of the air, remember) doesn’t mean that the pandemic is only responsible for those excess deaths – a bunch of people who might have otherwise been expected to get hit by a car worked from home all year, or died from COVID instead, etc.

So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of that baseline itself.

To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline up that much seems pretty impressive to me.

Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that excess and how China fared in the excess mortality department. After the early days they seemed to keep it tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion of the world’s population. That might suggest that excess mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion people mostly stuck to baseline?