This whole thing is really complicated, and beyond my understanding because of lack of full details. Say for example someone died of cancer because they were too frightend to go to hospital for treatment, but the hospital is open for them to attend. now we are talking about the fear of catching the virus having a material influence upon their death. Can this be attributed to Covid as being the cause?
someone else with exactly the same condition could decide to get treatment and may survive.
Yes it can because their fear is of COVID. Their death is COVID related and they wouldn’t have died if there wasn’t a pandemic.
Edit: to expand on this, it’s about how well we’ve done managing it. Government action to reduce fear includes clear messaging, safety procedures in place, etc. No different to reducing deaths directly from COVID in healthy people.
You could easily say someone only died from COVID directly because they didn’t take enough precautions, or had a certain condition, or were a certain age, until you salami slice away every single death. What would be the point in that? That’s why the only sensible measure is deviation from the norm (excess deaths).
Excess deaths also has the benefit of being a lot harder for governments to hide, and cuts right through the silly “cause of death” arguments. An authoritarian regime could lean on medics to record something else, but hiding the fact people are dead full stop is a lot harder in most countries.
The government is pushing this nonsense specifically because it prevents them from being compared with similar countries and undoubtedly coming off badly.