Governments are (very likely) irrelevant
Although “action bias” and “political partisanship” all but guarantee that people will be making governments responsible for the consequences of the pandemic at a national level, I do think that drawing conclusions on government policies from the number of deaths (or any other relevant covid19 related variable) is a very risky business: 1.- Deaths per million is a variable with a "probability distribution" 2.- The shape of this distribution very likely depends on several drivers that can be clustered into two main categories: "Non-actionable drivers": like average age, population density, genetics, prevalence of pre-existing conditions, "base" level of people interaction (very likely higher in Puerto Rico than in Stockholm), etc. "Actionable drivers": like lockdowns, mask wearing, rapid test availability, social distancing, health system preparedness, etc... 3.- These drivers "define" the shape of the distribution, but