In the US, any and every death of someone who had the virus, and many who did not, are still counted among the death tolls. The recent case of the guy who died from alcohol poisoning comes to mind, though I personally know of others who died from other causes, and were counted even though they hadnt been tested.
Conversely, there is good reason to be skeptical of China's accounting as well- both due to government interference and the simple fact that they were not able to reliably test the majority of cases.
If US has twice the test positive rate as another, they're only testing half the cases.
The fact is no matter what metric you look at, the US is doing worse with our response than almost anywhere else.
And we don’t know how China is really ever doing about anything. We need to stop confusing statements from China with transparency.
Comparing to those countries doesn't make much sense either because US is much wealthier. We should be doing far better than both, and we're not.