17,000 people have died from the flu in England annually between 2014/15 and 2018/19 - with the yearly deaths varying widely from a high of 28,330 in 2014/15 to a low of 1,692 in 2018/19.
https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus ... influenza/
This was due to an extremely mild influenza season last winter. Which, in turn, points to this year being another whopper for deaths as all of the "dry tinder" succumbs from last year. So, it is an extremely reasonable assumption to make that this year would have been up in the 30k range in any event.
Add in to that the massive fall in deaths by heart attack and stroke due to those otherwise statistically inevitable deaths being swapped over into the C19 column, this more than accounts for at least another 10k or so deaths attributed to the Covid19 column. Thus, the number of
extra deaths would be marginal.
Which is
EXACTLY what has been seen.
This year's
TOTAL deaths are barely above the yearly average.