1) Deaths from malignant neoplasms would need to go way down because they're being classified as COVID-19
and
2) Total deaths for the year would stay the same, because we're just moving numbers of deaths around between causes; not recording new unexpected numbers of deaths.
So let's examine each more closely. First, are deaths from malignant neoplasms way down from their normal levels?
Nope.
Did deaths in 2020 remain the same from 2019, 2018, etc.?
Number of deaths in the US in 2018: 2,839,205 Source
Number of deaths in the US in 2019: 2,854,838 Source
Number of deaths in the US in 2020: 3,247,894 Source - Preliminary but still rising)
Roughly 400,000 difference. That’s a 14% increase year-over-year. The last time we saw those kinds of numbers was World War II. This in the same year doctors and nurses in hospitals around the country and around the world say they're losing patients to a new disease. So again, the evidence directly contradicts this narrative of COVID-19 being just a bunch of misclassified deaths. That's not what's happening.
What HAS been happening is a mountain of incompetence in the states in terms of how they react to this. Rather than using resources to protect the vulnerable and rapidly distribute the vaccine, they've forced nursing homes to accept known-infected patients, convinced people to crowd into Costco to panic-buy all the toilet paper while spreading the disease, and waste valuable time sitting on vaccine doses because they can't figure out who should get them first. Some states have only distributed 25% or less of the vaccine doses they've been given. Useless incompetence.