I guess that out of 100 elderly fatalities, there are always a few cases where the family are not really shocked, because the patient has been hanging on for a while and could have been killed by many random hazards. The family was probably warned that the patient had only a few months of life expectancy. Such a fatality is not an excess mortality.
I used to question PAP government’s mid-2021 decision to carefully open up during Delta wave. I questioned the human cost in terms of fatalities. The Aha moment came when I realized excess mortality in SG was zero during that period.
The livelihood cost of zero-covid is complex, and includes hardship, long-term damage to the local economy, mental health.. Every month the governments pumped in billions to keep businesses on life support. This cost is s not easily measurable. But for the same argument, let’s say it is comparable to 2987 (excess) deaths a year.
What if SG maintains zero-covid and avoids those deaths, but the total mortality over a year remains the same as before covid (around 24,000)? It would mean that those 2987 covid deaths /prevented/ were offset by about the same number of deaths-by-other-causes, deaths that inevitably occur even in an airtight bubble city of zero covid.
It means that, in the grand scheme of things, the (heavy) price we pay in terms of livelihood actually buys us some benefit but not all that much.
Note in different scenario — hospital overrun — then excess mortality would be significant, definitely non-zero.