To be fair, the US is in kindof a weird position with respect to Covid 19. It's a perfect storm of 1) good testing (at least better than the developing world) and 2) inconsistent and ineffective responses to Covid.

I don't dispute that the US has performed poorly here, but the 25%/5% stat needs to be contextualised by the fact that other countries who have done really poorly (e.g. Brazil), have much less testing than the US has.

Deaths have nothing to do with testing.

"We can observe trends from the number of deaths reported each year, on a weekly basis. When we see large deviations in the numbers for a time period, we call that excess deaths. Looking at 2020 since March, the raw number of excess deaths is 200,000 more people than a normal year. When we try to understand that, COVID-19 is the most rational and likely explanation. If you don't believe it's COVID-19, try to pinpoint why this year has been so different than any other. Why would a new disease that kills people not be the cause?"

https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus...

Graphs:

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

Excess mortality has nothing to do with testing, you are entirely correct there.

However, most Covid deaths are counted as deaths post a positive test. Therefore, the tests provide the denominator for potential deaths.

The US has lots of testing (though probably not enough) and an overall poor response to the pandemic, causing the 25%/5% statistic, and hence my point.