The stats don't lie.. but they can fib.
I am actually a little amazed at how people seem to have an unstoppable compulsion to argue about statistics as a pretense to argue for their predetermined conclusion which has little to do with the large body facts. They seize upon one fact and they expand it out to cover far more than it should and thereby smother real facts that are inconvenient for their previously drawn conclusion.
Suppose we took this heuristic for measuring the severity of war fatalities. How would that look? Well, we lost 60,000 Americans during the Vietnam war, and about 5,000 for the war in Iraq. By all measures, not even a particularly bad month of the flu.
On the other hand, COVID-19 has allegedly killed over 91,000 of the 1.5 million Americans who have tested positive for it. Meaning roughly 6% of the people who have tested positive for it have died.
Maybe a better way to look at it is: it kills 1 out of 17 people who are infected.
The truth is somewhere in between
To assert with unshakeable confidence that these fatality figures are entirely factual is the same mistake mirrored in attempting to repudiate the epidemic completely because the books have been cooked. What is most remarkable is how easy it is to get people who make both of the opposite mistakes to shout lies at each other across a sea of misunderstanding.
People who are heavily emotionally invested in denying this problem are people who eagerly and compulsively attempt to discredit ALL the COVID deaths because SOME of them have been added fraudulently to the totals. But the number of deaths these people were dismissing as fake deaths a couple weeks ago have more than been replaced by real deaths in the meantime.
COVID might not always be the main reason for a death of someone who has it, but it clearly is the reason for most of the deaths, and secondly, for many it was not just the single straw that broke the camel's back, but rather is was an entire hay bale on a back that was quite capable of carrying its previous load for years longer.