That would certainly come down to a country by country thing. I don't know what criteria the US used in order to count a death. In India though, I gather people were dying before they could even get in a hospital, so none of those were counted at all. No testing was done. They were just thrown on the pyres, or in the river apparently..
Longer term, we'll probably be able to get closer to what the actual number is by tracking excess deaths in the Covid years compared to the average death rate. Though they'll probably have to do some estimations there too, since Covid lockdowns also led to a virtually non-existent flu season, and probably fewer car accident fatalities as a couple examples.
What can be seen already though is despite fewer deaths to other causes, there are still a significant number of excess deaths per week over the annual average through 2020 and early 2021.
Then there's projections you could do on what Covid could have been.. Even if you assume 2% mortality is too high, and we call it 1% instead. That still would mean Covid had the potential to kill 80 million people around the world, making it worse that WW2.
Fortunately, the extraordinary measures of masking, closing borders, lock-downs, and rapidly developed vaccines are all helping to keep that number far lower than it could've been had the world not done anything.
We're at 4.4 million and counting, but I'm hoping we've already past the worst of it with vaccines rolling out everywhere, and the final total won't exceed 10 million. Time will tell.
