I'd be curious to see rates by country by BMI and infection date. There were definitely lessons learned from Italy's early surge that helped other countries in the early days.

Nobody is going to be grateful for something that didn't happen, why would people be grateful for dying less as a population, if they in fact did not die less? Also there were lockdowns all over the world, not just in the US.

For example, the "US death rate" is somewhat meaningless because it encompasses multiple communities which adopted multiple strategies, with multiple levels of diligence, and covers both large concentrated populations and small distributed populations.

US deaths were not evenly spread, so there was certainly some variety of outcome with variety of mitigation.

Overall, the US death rate though is high, which suggests that it's very high in some areas. The correlation between strategy, compliance and outcome will feed researchers for a long time.

So to conclude the complete opposite of what the current data shows, dirty or not, is wrong. To then be upset at it is misguided.