*Not all those excess deaths are attributable to infection with Covid though. Some people have simply not been able or willing to access healthcare or see a doctor when they needed to and so have died. Ergo, nothing to do with catching Covid, everything to do with the impact that Covid has had on the wider healthcare network.
And yes, Covid can accelerate death in an already sick individual or cause death, but the way we count Covid deaths in this country has made our Covid death figures much higher than other countries who don't count every single death within 28 days of a positive Covid test as a Covid death.*
Yes to all this. I helped a friend nurse her elderly mother at home until she died at this time last year. The mother had decided that rather than go into hospital for treatment and an operation she would prefer to die at home. She was in her 80s but clear-headed about it, didn't want to risk her last days being spent on an under-staffed ward, neglected and unfed with her family banned from seeing her. She had a good death, in her own bed, with her cat beside her and her daughter holding her hand. One of her oldest friends had died in hospital with family watching on an iPad and it had horrified everyone who was aware of it, many of them elderly. I wonder how many of them refused treatment as a result of the fear of dying alone in an understaffed hospital?
We had a neighbour in his 50s who was terminally ill with lung cancer and expected to live less than a month when he caught Covid and died and was registered as a Covid death.
Every country seems to count Covid deaths slightly differently. We record as Covid deaths people who have died within 28 days of having tested positive for Covid. You could have asymptomatic Covid, come out of quarantine, fall off a ladder and break your neck and still be counted in the Covid figures. Other countries do it differently. It will take years for the numbers to be properly compared.