Clark
Apologies for not explaining more the source of my data.
The data about no of cases reported per country and of deaths related to Covid-19 come from COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). The source for population and density come from World Population Review
The other figures are calculated by me. The Overall rate is the number of reported cases divided by the population of that country. The CFR is the number of deaths divided by number of cases. I guess the number of deaths divided by the population may also be useful.
Of course this is all governed by the robustness of the data in the first place as you point out and I agree that the excess death rates may be more indicative, but these are not easy to extract from the different countries. Of course the numbers of cases and deaths are also a function of where in the epidemic countries are. For example China is fairly advanced in this respect because they were the first and went through suppression and possible resurgence, whereas Russia and Brazil and other Latin American countries are very much on the steep rise arm.. Another piece of data worth looking at is the daily changes shown in my first link as a bar chart.
There are different patterns. Take a look at US. The chart shows that what has actually happened is very partial suppression and continuation at a high level.
Whereas the pattern for Italy shows a good suppression. UK is in between.
These charts are worth looking at because I think they reflect effectiveness of measures taken by each country. The initial firmness of the lockdown shown by countries like Spain, Italy, France, Austria and other European countries are seen in their charts, whereas the chart for Iran shows how relaxation of measures leads to a rebound.