We should be very clear what we mean by "death rate" if we want to compare countries.

*Number of deaths: banner headline stuff but slightly meaningless as countries all have different numbers of people. The US might well be leading the table, but the US has five times as many people as the UK and four times as many as Germany.

*Number of reported deaths: grand if deaths are actually confirmed as having been related to Coronavirus. In this country, that's difficult without widespread testing. Not only that, there's commonly a delay between a death happening and its being added to the statistics, and that delay can be very variable from death to death, which complicates the analysis of trends. And we haven't been counting deaths outside hospitals. Wow. And see the first point.

*Death rate (e.g. deaths per thousand cases) in confirmed Coronavirus cases: great if you can do the confirming, which in many cases we can't. See above. But some countries can, at least a lot better than the UK, and results from different countries are alarmingly variable, which can raise more questions than answers, particularly about the effectiveness of the government's response, the matter of testing and contact tracing, the level of staffing and equipment in hospitals and whether frontline workers are being adequately equipped both for their own safety and the safety of, say, patients in hospital.

*Overall death rate per thousand/million in the population from any cause: would show an increase in a pandemic, which could be compared to past periods of time without pandemics, and we can take seasonal trends into account, but you still have to confirm which extra deaths were related to Coronavirus. This could be quite a useful measure but it isn't rock-solid.

I suppose we get to conclusions about trends and about how well we're doing by taking all of the above combined. But none of it is exact science, same as with issues concerning masks and social distancing effectiveness, for example, which is why I'm getting more and more suspicious of the fob-off line "we're following the science..." Following settled science is grand, but there currently isn't a lot of that around.

And don't get me started on "underlying conditions..."