Remember that 2020 cleared out a tremendous amount of "dry tinder" among the frail elderly in nursing homes and senior housing. This group was fairly large (which made it look like a lot of excess deaths) because 2017-2019 had declining rates of death--call them "excess lives" or "lucky survivors," it doesn't matter, no one gets out of the Dance of Life except one way, eventually--2020 was an inventory clearing year.

The 12 Sigma event reported by Indiana (40% jump in working age deaths) is something completely different, and completely horrible. As for counting sigmas if you can expect 5,000/10,000,000 (0.05%) of the working age population to kick off each year and 4,990 or 5010 die, that's just a rounding error; go 10% each way and you are looking at some sort of, maybe 2 or 3 sigma event. Go 40% (7,000) dead and you are in the once in 500,000,000 years or so happening due to chance.

So, this wasn't chance or run of the mill. Think more like war, invasion, gulag style numbers.