I am not familiar with Australia's response enough to give a conjecture on how good its policy is. Although I am familiar with Canada's response and (independently of death toll) think it was very suboptimal.

>I certainly don't think it is only policy diffferences.

And I agree with you, which is why I think using death toll as a single metric is a bad idea.

EDIT:

>If we had Canada's per capita rate, 400k fewer people would have died.

Even with the same policy as Canada, it is unlikely that the death toll would just transpose (it's a bad assumption, because policy doesn't define the death toll - it affects it)