The CDC's provisional COVID death counts are 95+% complete at 8 weeks.

They did not deliberately up the death toll by bribing hospitals to call everything a COVID death. That's not how anything works. They don't get extra money for a COVID death. Medicare patients got higher reimbursements for COVID care, but it wasn't tied to what was on death certificates. And the CDC COVID death count only includes deaths where COVID contributed to or was the underlying cause of death, not just simply as a incidental positive test. Incidental COVID deaths are not part of the CDC's definition:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/coding-and-reporting.htm

And that's not how the cycle thresholds work. Conflating picking up viral remnants with false positives is a no no. The CT will affect the former not the latter. The CT needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to viral load. In some cases it may be detecting viral fragments from a recovered patient. In other cases it may be detecting virus early in an infection before someone becomes contagious.