Would the burst of deaths from Covid show up this way?
Yep. We shouldn't give ourselves a pat on the back for nothing. If anything, we should be ashamed of the failure of pandemic pathogen containment and the needless deaths of 1.1M Americans.
Not achieving an unachievable fools errand isn't a failure. No matter what anyone ever did in any country would have ever had any chance of containing COVID whatsoever. Other than China in day one...