The only solid metric for COVID-19 deaths is excess mortality, that is, the actual number of deaths - the statistically expected number of deaths (e.g. extrapolating from the last 2-5 years).
This metric is independent of testing capacity and malicious actors like politicians just outright lying to the public to try to save face. You can "hide" dead people, but doing so is much harder than hiding COVID-19 related deaths.
You can't conclude from this metric what the source of all these extra deaths are, but if they are not caused by COVID-19, every alternative explanation I can think of is even worse than a global pandemic.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...
https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
One interesting thing is that COVID-19 lowers the mortality rate in the mid-to-long term. It disproportionately targets the weakest, so in the next couple of months and years, less people than the expected average will die, because the weakest are already dead, and that will lower the mortality rate per capita for one generation at least. At some point, it will hopefully raise again, and that too will be due to COVID-19, because the reason for that will be that we wouldn't have a recent-enough COVID-19-like event.
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Point being, one should be careful when comparing mortality rates and absolute death counts. One needs to factor in both to get the full picture, and for rate, the period over which the rate is computed is very relevant.
For instance, in Denmark, each and every dead person that is tested positive for Corona virus, count towards the death toll, even if they died from something obviously different. Even dead people is sometimes tested. It's not the same in all contries.
We will not have the full picture until we analyze the excess mortality rate on the other side of the pandemic. Then we can start to see what did the countries lowest excess death rate per capita do different.