but they are not a reason to dismiss the seriousness of covid, or that people concerned about 600K+ deaths from covid are pushing covid panic porn. From this thread you seem to be conceding the seriousness of covid, so now it's just disagreement with the reaction to it. Which is fine, and I probably come down closer to your side on lockdowns and always felt the biggest thing we could do was push individual responsibility (including masks) which was a) noticeably absent and in the US b) actively discouraged by Trump. But I think you're too quick to assign political motives to the US reaction to covid while failing to explain why a) US lockdowns were far less than most of the rest of the world and b) pretty much the entire fucking world reacted like the US or far stronger to Covid. Doesn't that give you a *little* pause that maybe the medical, epidemiology, public health throughout the entire world as whole might know what they're talking about. Other than people like you on random message boards and people like Trump or MTG, I don't see anyone with any level of medical / public health expertise downplaying the seriousness of covid. You may dismiss this as an argumentum ab auctoritate, but at some point you have to listen to experts, not random people with opinions. And the data certainly supports the conclusions of the experts.

As far as the CDC assigning 70% of deaths to covid, the attached link from the CDC has it at 75-88% of excess deaths being "directly associated with COVID-19". Their estimate of excess deaths through Feb 27 are 545,600–660,200 with 60K to 162K due to other causes leaving 400-600K due to Covid. And this is just through February. There have been another ~100K deaths from covid reported since then.

I think it's totally fair to have a discussion about the appropriate response to covid. It's simply ridiculous to look at all of the data and downplay the seriousness of covid, refer to it as a "nasty cold" or accuse people concerned about the seriousness of covid as pushing covid panic porn.