One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.
There were also people who just refused to acknowledge loved ones had died of covid, and actively tried to block death certificates from listing covid. This is discussed in for example this article . In many cases, the official records simply used whatever family members said was the cause. Some were even more extreme. From that article:
In Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, coroner Wavis Jordan said his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” Jordan does not investigate deaths himself. He requires families to provide proof of a positive coronavirus test before including it on a death certificate. In 2021, he hasn’t pronounced a single person dead from COVID-19 in the 80,000-person county.
While part of this is due to lack of resources, and both TFA and the above linked piece discuss some of that, part of this is political in nature, with one end of the US right-wing deciding that covid wasn't a major issue and thus downplaying covid deaths. Unfortunately, downplaying a disease for political reasons doesn't make it less deadly.
I mean there's plenty of museum exhibits in LA that feature our contributions to unmanned space flight as well. For instance at this very same museum there is a full sized engineering mockup of the Cassini probe. I think the Griffith Observatory used to have a full sized mockup of Voyager as well but I don't think its there any more. In any case manned space flight has always captured the public's imagination a lot more than unmanned flight has, with maybe a few exceptions like Hubble and Webb telescopes.
Also "Ironic that L.A. wonks...." do you also include in that the Florida wonks, and the D.C. wonks, and the New York wonks, and the Houston wonks who all have or wanted an orbiter of their own and or have other manned rockets like the huge Saturn V exhibit at Kennedy?
Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.