Given that the normal causes of excess death have been significantly truncated: driving, drinking and sports, its fairly reasonable to assume that standard causes of death have dropped

Gosh, where did you get this idea from? Is this a new talking point from somewhere?

Taking the UK again as an example, road deaths are rare and stable at about 1700 per year or about 32 per week:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

Overall weekly deaths are 10,000 or so (outside of spike times). Even if the roads became totally empty tomorrow you wouldn't be able to see the difference, it'd be lost in the noise. And obviously lockdown doesn't lead to empty roads: people must still drive to deliver goods, engage in urgent business and so on, so reduction in weekly deaths due to less driving would in reality be less than 32.

As for drink - do you really think people drink less when locked up on their own for months on end? They don't, they drink far more:

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/bored-br...

Finally, deaths due to sport?! In an average year in the UK between 15-25 people "die accidentally in athletic/sporting areas" according to the ONS. Deaths due to sport aren't relevant on the scales we're talking about.

Look, I'm never going to change your mind, but just look at those stats. Something caused a huge spike

I am looking at the stats. That's why I consider COVID to be mass hysteria.

Yes, there's a spike in some countries. It's not in any way describable as huge. UK spike matches the famous plague years of 1998/1999/2000. I don't remember any particular special disease in those years:

https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/uk-flu-comparison....

In other countries like Switzerland literally nothing happened different to previous years:

https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/schweiz-todesfaell...

Staggeringly, in Germany this supposedly deadly disease killed nobody at all when measured using excess deaths:

https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/sterbefallzahlen-d...

Yet according to the official stats 10,000 people died of COVID. Clearly this claim can't be true. Where are all these excess deaths?

What's happening here is a highly infectious but virtually harmless virus has been labelling an ever increasing segment of the population as COVID positive. A tiny number of these people really do get hurt by the virus, but that's not important in the grand scheme of things: apparently even the common cold can kill 8% of the elderly. With basically any virus, and especially flu, you can get alarming stories of battles with death by people who were apparently healthy - just search for them and you'll find them. It doesn't by itself mean the virus is dangerous, which is always a relative term.

What happens if you randomly label a huge and ever-increasing section of the population, then measure their health? You get "COVID associated deaths" (which means nothing, it's just a statistical artifact) and you get an ever-widening array of "associated symptoms", because you're measuring normal health activity but re-assigning the cause. So I admit defeat on the "epic shits" point - I should know by now not to say COVID is a respiratory disease and thus can't cause $RANDOM_SYMPTOM, because public health has lost its mind and is publishing papers on random correlations all over the place. The fact that correlation doesn't imply causation has been totally lost.

How can you convert a not very dangerous virus into an excess death spike? Well, it'd cause a small spike by itself anyway, but if you want to make it bigger doing things that increase the spread of every virus sounds good to me: things like flushing all the sick people out of hospitals into care homes, creating panic in said care homes that leads to abandonment (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023), locking people indoors where they're coughing all over each other, putting people into depressions etc.