Not sure you can say "absolutely wrong" when the chart you posted clearly has "NOW" at essentially the SAME POINT as it was in 2018 in overall deaths. Your chart, you posted. If it helps, I can draw a dotted line for you. As for "we did not have effective ways to treat COVID", we didn't have to have effective ways. A 3rd grader could have understood that taking infected people and shacking them up with the elderly and highly ill would have been a bad move.
Im familiar with the NY NJ nursing home claim. If I recall correctly, this situation occurred in April and it was something like the peak nursing home deaths occurred a week prior to Cuomo’s executive order. NJ was different because there was confusion of policy and at the time there were a few scandals within the nursing homes, one being a nursing home had no way or nowhere to move the deceased and they sort of just stacked the bodies. Truly awful stuff. Cuomo claimed the state interpreted CDC guidance wrong and amended the executive order to state discharged after testing negative. However, I have never felt anything other than NY should have known not to place people in nursing homes without a negative test. But this is one of those complicated issues you have to really drill down. As to the now analysis for a comparison to the 2018 flu mortality rates we are exceeding excess deaths. 2018 the flu was incredibly bad and deaths shot above the excess deaths threshold for a short time but it only serves as a marker to show just how sustained and unrelenting excess deaths from Covid are.
The situation in NY was, indeed, tragic. But officials should have known better. And the same goes for all the other state's officials that followed NY's lead. Fools, the lot of them. And what's worse, is that policy was made taking those numbers into account as if the virus would be that deadly everywhere. This was the true tragedy. We overreacted in a BIG way. As for the chart, all I'm saying is the total deaths right now are around the same levels as they were back in 2018. The difference between expected is greater, but this is because of expected seasonality.
Ok. And all I am saying is that orange line represents excess deaths and we have blowing way past if for months and months due to Covid. That right there proves that excessive amounts of people are dying and it’s not people who were on their “death beds.”