"...adjusting for age, we experienced what seemed to be normal death rates in 2000 as essentially unthinkable [during COVID-19] in 2020. The result: a 20-year setback that felt more like a once-in-a-century, or even unprecedented, social rupture... It took an astonishing reversal to reveal astonishing gains we’d come almost entirely to take for granted."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/covid-19-pandemic-deaths.html