I think inflated. You have a 75 year old with cardiac disease, COPD, and diabetes, then catches COVID and dies. The COVID certainly did him no favors, but what did he really die from?
It’s really a matter of semantics, as a lot of death info is.
If you aren’t going to count the proximate cause of death (like “heart stopped”), and instead are going to figure out what caused the event, you are basically making some educated guesses. Heart Disease? What caused that, were they a smoker, did they get scared, did they have low blood pressure, did they get an electric shock?
If I was dying of an illness, and took a medication for it, and that medication was keeping me alive, but then I got a side-effect from the medication and it killed me, why am I dead? Because my liver failed, or because of the disease I was trying to stave off with medications that destroyed my liver?
It’s easy to know that someone died of ammonia poisoning, but was it important that they had liver failure? And that the liver failure was caused by carcinoma that migrated to the liver tissue?