[const_cast]

I can blame Trump for his policy and also his and the larger Republicans parties ideological brigade against medicine and science. Which still continues to this day, and will continue to take lives.

I'm not above blaming extremely powerful people for harmful abstract ideology. I'll do it.

[ben_w]

Sure, and I do too, but the relative difference between "ideological brigade against medicine and science" and "what the various Europen countries did" suggests that the difference between Trump as he was and a plausible competent alternative still didn't add up to 5e5 lives per 342 million population.

China, I think, managed to get their response right (eventually, having failed hard right at the start). Either that or they managed to hide the death toll in several different dependent outputs that all roughly agree with these numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...

(That said, this map also says that the USA should be ruled over by Canada, with King Charles as head of state etc., I absolutely do not disagree that a lot of dumb things were done and should've played out differently, this is just a relative statement about how incredibly mediocre a lot of our other leaders besides Trump are in the supposedly developed nations…)