I have family in Germany and they had a far earlier and stricter lockdowns and far better testing and tracing early on than the UK or US, resulting in far fewer

I have family in Germany and they had a far earlier and stricter lockdowns and far better testing and tracing early on than the UK or US, resulting in far fewer infections. (At least until December or so when things started to look a lot more similar.) With a strict lockdown the effects are of course look not so bad since far fewer people get infected. How is the FT article cherry-picking? The numbers I referred to are in the section titled, "Death rates have climbed far above historical averages in many countries that have faced Covid-19 outbreaks". They show the total excess deaths since 100 confirmed cases for each country, approximately a year of data for each. These figures are simply the number of deaths from all causes recorded in each country. From the FT data you can see that Brazil had 23% excess mortality over approximately a year of data. It didn't see the huge early spikes seen in Peru where seroprevalence studies estimate about 40% of people were infected in Lima: https://andina.pe/ingles/noticia-peru-nearly-4-million-people-may-already-have-had-covid19-in-lima-metropolitan-area-827959.aspx https://andina.pe/ingles/noticia-peru-nearly-4-million-peopl... I can't find directly comparable figures for Brazil, but in July in Rio de Janeiro (vs December, though Peru's big outbreak from those graphs was early on) it was around 4% rather than 40%.