I should add: The surprise here to me that I'm trying to decide what I make of is that a bunch of normal European countries with normal leaders seem to have badly bungled this too.

Easy to make allowances for Italy — it's objectively difficult to be hit early plus nobody thinks of Italy as a model of good governance anyway. But the per capita stats on France and the Netherlands are awful too.

Super-sophisticated methodology here ... took non-Communist Europe and made the country green if there are fewer per capita deaths than the US and red if there are more.

Not really a pattern we normally associate with any underlying variables.