"Excess deaths are a measure of how many more people are dying than would be expected compared to the previous few years.
Although it is difficult to say how many of these deaths have been caused by Covid-19, they are a measure of the overall impact of the pandemic."
Countries like Vietnam were very protective, and took very immediate actions. They faced both the first two waves quickly, and recovered fairly well for the region.
As a further counterpoint, I'll use Norway and Sweden as examples. Sweden did not implement a lockdown, yet had a 10x worse per capita death count than Norway. If anything, this suggests that you'd need around 70-90% of the excess deaths to be attributed to something other than COVID, which feels like a heavy bar to clear.
Many pieces to this puzzle - generational living, skin tone and diet for example.
the situation is much more complicated. Looking at excess deaths
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/excess-mortality-across-countr...
one can see that in Sweden despite high rate of death, the excess rate is very low compare to countries with comparable Covid death rates. The Norway and Finland are among the few exceptional countries who had negative excess rates.