I know many deaths were wrongly attributed to COVID everywhere, the whole debacle about deaths 'with COVID' or 'from COVID', among others. Question is your point only reinforces my argument, because the data we have shows the US rates were roughly the same up to one of the worst, and the data we don't have we don't know what it says.
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.
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.