The medical examiner will use the definition he is told to use.
Even if someone is operating in good faith it can be difficult to determine actual causes of death. Death from COVID and death with COVID are two different things.
That said, you regularly harp on the "FAKE NUMBERS!" side of things. Some people are certainly manipulating numbers for political gain, but I'm not convinced it is as common as you pretend. Charby was likewise worried about the sneaky Republicans manipulating testing to hide COVID19 infections in Iowa. Just as his concerns turned out to be partisan fearmongering, so too your constant claims that because some numbers aren't accurate all numbers are junk therefore we must ignore them all is little more than a conspiracy theory.
I have no doubt that Charby's medical examiner and dogmush's hospital contacts are seeing a real increase in death associated with COVID19. Their areas have not yet been hit very hard or at all. When COVID19 reaches those areas they will see similar increased death rates as other areas - especially among elderly and those with serious preexisting health conditions, but also somewhat randomly among otherwise pretty healthy young people. People going through this for the first time are worried because they're only seeing now what many parts of the country saw months ago. The data are pretty consistent when you adjust for the infection start, isolation efforts, and testing.
Deaths associated with COVID tend to spike over the course of something like two to two and a half months followed by a taper down in a long tail. Lockdowns and mask requirements can stretch this out but the ultimate end result is the about the same because at some point the lockdown lifts and COVID has infection reservoirs all over the world and will come back in.
I know you've recognized several times that COVID kills people. If your argument is that the death rate is low enough, or the age of the people killed is high enough that we shouldn't shut down or shouldn't require masks, or whatever ... fine, make that point. That doesn't mean that the numbers are complete bunk. What they show is pretty consistent and - like any statistic - only as alarmist as the person reporting them.
