Deaths aren't even remotely overcounted. If you would like a very long and in-depth article on how deaths (not just COVID deaths) are counted in the US. This is really good reading. understand that a death isn't necessarily due to 1 thing, and that unwrapping it all is a very time consuming process.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-deaths/
Some comments from the article:
The experts who are involved in counting novel coronavirus deaths at all levels — from local hospitals to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — disagree with the president. If anything, they say, these deaths are undercounted.
Some of this reasoning is based on logic. We know that we had a widespread shortage of tests when people were already dying of COVID-19, so it makes sense that these two problems would overlap at times.
Other reasoning is based on data. In a lot of states the number of pneumonia deaths in March was higher than what you’d expect for that time of year, or for the level of influenza active during that time — an important detail, given that pneumonia can often be a complication of that disease as well.
Yet another reason why experts say we’re
not overcounting COVID-19 deaths is that we’re now counting them in much the same way as we have always counted deaths from infectious disease. The methodology is longstanding and is used for all sorts of diseases — and there’s never been cause to think that the methodology made us overcount the deaths from those other diseases.
If you look at the CDC’s annual report of flu deaths, for example, you’ll see that it’s “estimated,” modeled on official flu deaths reported, deaths from flu-like causes reported, and what we know about flu epidemiology. The calculation is done this way precisely because public health officials know that
a straight count of formally diagnosed flu deaths would be an undercount of actual flu deaths.
Likewise, when a doctor lists COVID-19 as a condition that led to someone’s death — even if it was just the last in a series of illnesses — they’re not doing anything different from what’s been done with the flu for years,
Basically, if you think COVID-19 deaths are being inflated, then you shouldn’t trust annual flu death counts, either. Or a whole host of other death counts.
If there’s any major difference between the way we count flu deaths and the way we count COVID-19 deaths, it’s that nobody is trying to publish flu deaths daily, in real time.
There is also alot of talk in this article on the CDC 'slow death' count vs the CDC 'fast death' count. Basically, counting deaths is actually difficult. The CDC is reporting 2 different stats and they are easy to confuse.
As of May 19,
the CDC’s slow count was 67,008, and
its fast count was 90,340.
The smaller, slow count is more accurate, but it doesn’t reflect how many people have died as of today. It’s weeks behind. The fast count does a better job of portraying the real-time situation, but the exact number will shift as state and local counts fluctuate.
All of this is why we won’t know the
exact number of people who died of COVID-19 for years, Aiken said. Again, that’s nothing new.
Final estimates for the number of people who died in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic weren’t published until 2011.
(my comment - keep in mind the official 'flu estimate' for each year comes out 2 years later. it is also always higher than the 'official count' number from that year - usually by a factor of 4-6X. Official death certificates for flu usually number around 8-10K per year)
Death is hard — hard to count, hard to experience. The personal and the statistical both reside in a space where the question of “what happened” can be answered as an absolute — as certain as we can ever be about a thing — while simultaneously remaining painfully inexact and mysterious.
