Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. No country avoided it entirely, but a lot of them managed to get rid of at least half the deaths (keep in mind that that's with still with individuals people being rebellious), sometimes more.
Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:
* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%
* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%
* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%
* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.
* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.
* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries
* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%
Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.
(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)
Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:
* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%
* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%
* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%
* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.
* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.
* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries
* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%
Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.
(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)