Here's an article about excess deaths in the U.S. which touches on some of the reasons there have been so many deaths here:
>>>Although the vast majority of the excess deaths are due to the virus, the CDC mortality records also expose swollen numbers of deaths from heart disease, hypertension, dementia and other ailments across two years of pandemic misery. . . . The CDC's excess deaths tracker shows in graphic detail the speed and intensity of that initial wave: Deaths had soared more than 40 percent above normal nationally in the second week of April 2020.
The lethality was concentrated in a few hot spots: In the second week of April, deaths in New York City were seven times the norm. But some regions had minimal change in mortality for many months. . . . The CDC records show a small, but distinct spike in deaths in late 2017 and early 2018, driven by an unusually severe flu season. But that was a tiny bump compared with what the CDC has seen since the coming of the coronavirus. . . .
The United States on the whole has an unusually high rate of chronic health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and has a long-recognized "health disadvantage" compared with other wealthy nations.
That disadvantage was exacerbated by a weak and scattershot response to the pandemic, Woolf said. Other countries that reacted more quickly or took more aggressive postures to control viral spread early on were able to limit their death toll as well as long-term economic impacts, he said.
"We did not handle it well. That's glaringly obvious," he said. "The other countries got hit by the same virus, but no country has experienced the number of deaths we have, and even if you adjust for population, we are among the highest in the world."<<<
The United States has recorded more than 1 million "excess deaths" since the start of the pandemic, government mortality statistics show, a toll that exceeds the officially documented lethality of the coronavirus and captures the broad consequences of the health crisis that has entered its third...
www.yahoo.com
It occurred to me that Canada might track COVID deaths differently than in the U.S., in which case the excess deaths might be a better way to compare the effects of the pandemic in the two countries (I suspect that there probably isn't much of a difference in how the two countries track COVID deaths, but I haven't found anything directly proving or disproving this).
I did find one website listing excess deaths in Canada, but I have not tried to crunch the numbers on a per capita basis in order to directly compare the two countries (perhaps the numbers have already been crunched, and I didn't see it).
The dashboard presents data that are relevant for monitoring the impacts of COVID-19 on mortality in Canada. It includes the latest weekly death data, historical weekly death data back to 2014, updated adjusted (i.e. the estimated number of weekly deaths) and expected weekly death counts...
www150.statcan.gc.ca
