> It's a fairly typical place for a western country to be at this stage of the pandemic
I'm horrified you can waive it away as "fairly typical" for a western country when Texas has a deaths/1 million population 3 times that of Canada, 4 times that of Denmark and on and on.
Denmark has about half the Covid-19 deaths per capita of the next highest European country based on the figures I've found. They're very much not typical. Neither is Canada, though I haven't been able to figure out what gave them such good results early on since they didn't do anything that unusual and it really doesn't seem to have lasted (their new infection rate crossed that of the US and hit an all-time high recently). Denmark's the usual combination of being reasonably well distanced from Italy geographically and geopolitically, strict border closures starting in March 2020, and a certain amount of lockdown and social distancing mixed in - there's a handful of countries like that with reasonable results. (The other Nordic countries minus Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia spring to mind. Think there's a few others as well, but not many.)
I'm horrified you can waive it away as "fairly typical" for a western country when Texas has a deaths/1 million population 3 times that of Canada, 4 times that of Denmark and on and on.