Historically, the CDC raises the expected death baseline by 2% per year. In 2020, they lowered the expected death baseline by 1.5% from 2019. So rather than increasing the expected baseline by 2%, expected deaths for 2020 moved in the opposite direction by 3.5%.
EXPECTED DEATHS 2017 - 2,807,118 2018 - 2,864,098 (+2.03%) 2019 - 2,925,719 (+2.15%) 2020 - 2,881,554 (-1.51%)
The reason this matters is that if the expected deaths baseline is higher, the total number of excess deaths is lower. In other words, excess deaths are obtained by subtracting two numbers: the number of deaths and the expected number of deaths. Therefore, the number of excess deaths is determined by how expected deaths are calculated.
Why did the CDC lower the expected deaths for 2020❓
Lowering the expected death baseline inflates the number of excess deaths in 2020 by around 115,000 deaths
https://gab.com/KanekoaTheGreat/posts/105657839438389567