I don’t think that was answered but I’m not sure what conclusion would be drawn. Surely the deaths from 'flu dropped during COVID. They probably did during WW2 as well.
I don’t believe the OP’s question was anything other than political; I’ve been a T1 with an HbA1c above 7% and I didn’t much care. When my HbA1c got below 7% my doc gave up on coercion and indeed threat, “I’m going to send you to an endo if your HbA1c doesn’t get a lot better.” It was a compelling argument. I tried (I searched on the Internet, yes, that is trying) and I found the Eros and the G4. The first worked for me and the second did not so I abandoned the CGM and stuck to “love and sex” as embodied by the Omnipod and accurately translated by wikipedia
But my experience is personal and I’m fairly sure that I am not alone.
When I advocate for CGMs and Insulin Pumps for All (primarily CGMs) I am most certainly being political but I don’t use HbA1c as a reductive proof of my, certainly political, point of view. I argue that “happiness” is what we should be measuring, not HbA1c. That’s a whole load of different things.
Yet at the personal level HbA1c is a real and useful metric for all of us. Just a metric, not a life aim. Had I visited my doc on the same regular visits but with an HbA1c of 6.5% we would just have discussed the things we normally discussed. He rightly interrupted the discussion with my HbA1c and he responsibly interrupted it with the fact that all diabetics should take statins.
Low BG is a really, really big deal. Low BG while driving a car is death on a bicycle. So I advocate for CGMs for all but I also say anyone who has had a low BG while driving a car should look at CGMs, particularly ones that are integratable with the 'phones we use for navigation. That’s a personal thing; I went too many years without CGM tech that worked and in reality I relied on my high eAG to protect the people around me.
Take from that what helps, YDMMV.