At least the reason the US had the highest rate of COVID fatality in the developed world, by April 2021 anyway, is made plain by Fueri's post.
The United States has suffered nearly one-fifth of the world’s covid-19 deaths, according to Hopkins’s own data, even as it accounts for just over 4 percent of the world’s population. Twenty-three percent of the world’s recorded coronavirus cases have occurred among Americans.
“In my book, I think of the U.S. as having the worst outcomes,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist who co-led the pandemic preparedness index, which she said was meant to measure capacity, and not as a predictive tool. “It’s just the size of our epidemic and the fact that it didn’t have to be this way.”