COVID-19 has been with us for almost a year as a news item. The reports indicate, that a lot of people died of the disease. Every lost life is a tragedy, of course. It is important to understand, how exactly the pandemic affected mortality in large populations. Unfortunately, the cause of death attribution to COVID-19 is not always accurate. Sometimes people are recorded as have died of the virus simply because they tested positive, even when they had none of very few real symptoms. On the other hand, some deaths from the infection might very well gone unnoticed. So today I will use some python code and publicly available figures to try and draw some conclusions from the data that we do have and can be reasonably confident about.