I haven’t done any research into UK deaths, but the CDC says the same thing about US deaths even though they themselves report 2.85M American deaths with less than a week left in 2020: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm While there were 2.91M deaths in 2019 (page 20): https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/mortality/WMR2019/WorldMortality2019DataBooklet.pdf I do also know that in the US there was an upward trend in deaths spanning the last 8 years, which means the deaths this year SHOULD have been higher than the last 5 years. And since each year got progressively higher, taking an average of the last five years would produce a number significantly lower than what the expected death rate for this year would have been even without Covid.