If people live 100 years, you have 1% of the population die each year. In the US, COVID has killed a quarter-million, which is just under 0.1%, so an increase of under 10%. You'll barely see a 10% increase on a noisy chart.
In practice, that's a 50% increase some months, and a 1% increase others. So it looks underwhelming. But it isn't the same people.
But it's definitely not just people who would have died anyway. We're also at just under 1 in 30 people infected. If everyone caught COVID, you'd naively see 30x as many deaths, or 7.5 million dead.
Practically, not everyone would catch COVID, and by demographics, I suspect fewer would die, so we'd be talking maybe 2-3 million excess deaths if we let it burn. And probably another few million with long-term disability.