In America, more people have already died of covid in January than normally die of the flu in a whole year. At some point "baseline" is going to rise to incorporate this new thing.
edit: which is higher than some recent annual flu totals they have, but considerably lower than estimates of annual flu deaths I’ve seen elsewhere? I feel like I’m missing some context for interpreting these numbers.
In Ireland, at one point in the pandemic, a lot of attention was paid to rip.ie, an obituaries website, because the non-hospital official death count was _months_ in arrears; the mechanisms around death reporting were just not designed for realtime analysis.
For some sense of the scale, the WHO estimates 15 million deaths globally by end 2021, vs 5.5 million confirmed in the same period. But generally the WHO uses the confirmed figure; the estimate would rile up conspiracy theorists. I'd expect, given the situation in the US, that the CDC would be even more politically sensitive.