I don't know, I don't want to get too conspiratorial either, but the other day I saw Rand Paul talking about the same thing: that the statistics had been inflated by including as Covid cases and Covid deaths completely asymptomatic people who had been admitted to hospitals, etc. for other causes.
Excess death numbers matched or exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths throughout 2020-2021, and also matched the spikes. This means that if COVID-19 numbers were inflated, these people still died of something that they wouldn't have died of otherwise... so is there another pandemic that we don't know about?
Well, I've already said that I don't want to get too conspiranoid, but I think it's a fallacy to think that if there was an excess of deaths, it was due to another pandemic. The excess deaths can be partly explained by COVID, partly due to hospital overcrowding, which meant that non-COVID tests and checkups were delayed and people died from other causes, which were not detected in time.