NY Eve I was told by a friend who's partner works in NHS IN NE Wales that for last few weeks magmt instruction is that all deaths of over 60's are to be put down as COVID.

Yes it is richard t..they recieve extra money ( to cope you know) for covid deaths.. I think this has gone on since the start of all this crap..

Social distancing and hand washing to slow the spread of a respiratory virus not surprisingly stops all type viruses including flu.

Pathogens are spread through social contact so the covid measures are going to reduce all such things.
Same for colds and so on.

NY Eve I was told by a friend who's partner works in NHS IN NE Wales that for last few weeks magmt instruction is that all deaths of over 60's are to be put down as COVID.

That’s been standard since the outset according to a nurse friend in the south.

I had also heard about flu deaths being down here in the US. But I'm not getting that from the CDC data here: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6/data

I've imported that data to a MySQL database on my laptop to make it easier to query, but you can get the information you need using the Filter button on that site. In the Filter section, set Jurisdiction of Occurrence to 'United States'. Then in Roll-Ups & Drill-Downs, set Group By to "MMWR Year", Roll-Up to "Influenza and pneumonia", and Function to "Sum".

The result is 49658 deaths for 2019, and 51244 for 2020. Unfortunately, influenza and pneumonia are combined in these data. Perhaps there is a better data source, but I haven't seen it yet.