My mistake, it was actually 44% above average at the peak. This is all cause mortality over the last winter.
By Christmas it was 30% above the average you'd expect for the time of year, by early Feb it peaked at 44% above the average.
I'd suggest that's hardly a "nothing to see here" scenario.
But how do I know it is covid and not the other things we mentioned? Because covid has been 'mentioned' on their death certificate?
The number of cases over the winter was correlated with hospitalisations due to Covid which was correlated with deaths:
Note the slight delay - a rise in cases led to a rise in hospitalisations a bit later which then led to deaths.
Famously, correlation does not imply causation but I'd suggest this is pretty good evidence that Covid was the main factor.
Also, the number of Covid deaths correlates quite closely with the numbers of excess deaths.
Early in the pandemic the deaths from Covid were certainly being over-reported - someone would be marked as a Covid death if they died and had had a positive test at
any previous point.
That was obviously silly and even they admitted that in the end and adjusted it to 28 days. So sure, someone could have had a positive Covid test and then within 4 weeks had a motorcycle accident but I'd suggest that is statistically rare. There will certainly be cases where someone old and vulnerable had all kinds of things wrong with them, caught Covid and that would have been recorded as a factor in their death. The reality of course is that they would have died anyway, Covid might have helped to kick them out the door a bit sooner. But it's pretty hard to argue that Covid has not been a factor in a lot of these deaths.
The other things you mentioned are a lot of cancelled elective surgeries. And sure, that will have caused people a lot of problems, but they're elective for a reason - generally you're not going to die if you don't have the surgery. I know two people who had heart surgery last year. In both cases it was urgent so they did it quickly. The lack of appointments and treatments will cause people both discomfort and will almost certainly lead to excess deaths over the next few years, but it's pretty unlikely to have led to that many excess deaths so quickly. And it's surely too much of a coincidence that the excess deaths happened over the winter when respiratory diseases are at their peak.
TL;DR - Covid has clearly killed a lot of people. Were lockdowns the right thing to do? Probably not - or certainly not the way we did them. Was it worth all the long term consequences that lockdowns will cause both economically and in terms of people's physical and mental health - again, probably not. But this was clearly a situation which demanded a response.