Might very well have been so.
That’s the gold part of the Excess Deaths gold standard. If you are seeing excess, it means deaths are occurring at a higher count than in previous years, during which those same comorbidities existed on average.
And . . . the ED curves match the Covid curves. Hard to escape that.
Many EDs should also be attributed to adverse lockdown effects: Suicide, drug overdoses, failure to get timely cancer screenings due to fear of going to hospitals, failure to treat heart attack victims due to decisions to prioritize COVID, supply-chain disruptions, and of course the vaxes themselves.