Not sure why you think that populous countries should have advantages in technology and research, but many countries that are doing great in those areas are rather small countries (Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Finland, Singapore, the Netherlands). I also don't think that you can trust the official death stats in the US. I saw some stat today that in many states there have been far more pneumonia deaths than usual those last couple of months. For example in Indiana there were 2149 pneumonia deaths, while the five year average is 384. In Illinois there were 3984 pneumonia deaths, while the five year average is 782, and so on ...
Either you believe that this is a coincidence unrelated to coronavirus or you have to assume that the deaths are massively undercounted in the US. I think a conservative guess for the real number of deaths would be 150 000.