From the linked article: "The raw death counts help give us a rough sense of scale: for example, the US suffered some 275,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 1 March and 16 August, compared to 169,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period."
So that's 275k-169k=106k extra deaths, which is a napkinmath'd 17% increase over the baseline (assuming that's 106k deaths over a 12wk period, and baseline is ~50k/week).
A 17% rise in extra deaths seems pretty dramatic to me, regardless of the graphs.
Granted, I'd love to see error bars on this stuff, but I don't think the axis starting at 0 is some nefarious plot to dramatize the data.
So that's 275k-169k=106k extra deaths, which is a napkinmath'd 17% increase over the baseline (assuming that's 106k deaths over a 12wk period, and baseline is ~50k/week).
A 17% rise in extra deaths seems pretty dramatic to me, regardless of the graphs.
Granted, I'd love to see error bars on this stuff, but I don't think the axis starting at 0 is some nefarious plot to dramatize the data.