Facetiousness aside, and even without medical training, I maintain that even if the 97% is factual, that it wasn’t the
“underlying causes” that cut their lives short.
It was the Grim Reaper in the guise of Covid that was the cause.
That we all have a rendezvous with the Reaper is carved in stone, it’s also impossible to know how the 97% would have fared without contracting Covid, but they did, and that; if we are to believe the 97%, was what exacerbated their underlying causes.
That without contracting Covid there is a least a chance that some of them with the aid of modern medicine and health care would have been able to survive.