Honestly, those tables show me the opposite story: while there has been an increase in total deaths during the period, most of the excess mortality is localized to a few weeks. The remaining weeks show little variance from the five years aggregate data given in the tables. This tells me that there was, maybe, an outbreak, not an epidemic. This table only gives stats for all deaths, so I can't figure the cause of death from it. While you can blame it on the promoted disease, you still have to take into account the impact of the measures that were taken, which include fear. For example, how many people died because they chose not to seek required medical care to avoid catching the meme flu? All in all, it paints a picture that's far less frightening than what we've been led to believe. edit: what's funny is that the UK has among the worse death rate for corvid, far worse than the US, which was used as an example of poor management of the crisis (orange man bad)