You would want to know how many deaths which would otherwise have been recorded as alcohol related, were actually recorded as entirely covid related in this period.
I don't see a link to the study (an unforgivable oversight in every case) but it's a good call out to consider the pandemic when we're talking about those years. There was a solid decade of people brutally abusing data from around the Great Recession without calling out that everything was absolutely bonkers due to the Great Recession. It'll be even worse with data around the pandemic years because people would rather score their points than just be fucking honest.