wE HAVE CHOSEN TO Look at all-cause mortality because it is the least-biased way to look at deaths.

It's also an indicator of what's going on in the population. If you look at all-cause mortality, any signal will tell you if something is happening, at least (on the scale of the society - what's happening which causes death. It's not ambiguous like just filtering out particular deaths, but at the scale of the society you can really see what's happening)

The seasonal variations before the COVID period, you can go back to the 2nd world war, and th ebeginning of the century and so on, and it's a very well-known phenomenon that's very regular and which occurs everywhere in the mid latitude countries - in the northern and southern hemisphere - and it's a phenomenon that's no very well understood. There is a regular pattern with a clear historic trend and then there's a break to a new regime, where we don't even come down close to the summer baselines that we had seen before.

For teh first time in 2020, there is no summer baseline in the US. You would expect it to go back, but it never does. Instead, it picks up again. In the summer where you would expect to see a trough, you have a peak. You can see a blow-up  by time in that region.