"...What I mean is, how many of these deaths would, for example, have occurred by the end of the year?"
Yes, its entirely possible that the numbers would be roughly the same, but the issue is and has always been not the overall numbers but the massive impact of them all arriving at the same time, overwhelming the Health service and creating knock-on deaths elsewhere.
-The spike you see in the chart proposes that this was no fantasy scenario but that there was/is a seriously real danger of genuine chaos.