Every community has a baseline mortality rate during "normal" times. During abnormal times like pandemic, famine and war, more people die than usual, but often the cause isn't known.

If you subtract baseline mortality from actual mortality to get excess mortality, that's often a better estimate of the casualties from pandemic, famine and war than the death certificates for every person who died.

Excess mortality in most countries shows that Covid deaths are significantly under-reported.

And if there are fewer deaths from flu, and fewer from suicide [1], then excess mortality itself is under-reported and Covid killed even more than we thought.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/04/08/defying-expectations-...