Comparing countries is very unreliable as different countries are testing different amounts of people at different times in the disease.
In addition, a lot of mortality depends on demographics. If, as a first world country, you are good at keeping people alive into their9th and 10th decades, a lot will succumb to Covid should they get it. Is this a tragedy? Ultimately they have to die of something and my guess is that Covid is kinder than a lot of cancers or living with chronic COPD for years. I suspect 3rd world countries with young populations will have far lower mortality rates.
We have chosen to have an underfunded NHS for years, and also have invested considerable resources into helping people deal with poor life choices (alcoholism, morbid obesity and the concomitant diabetes and smoking). We also support arguable non essentials such as fertility treatment and ‘gender reassignment’.
You could argue all the above choices are the marks of a progressive, compassionate society but they are choices and the money could have been put into ICUs and additional acute care.
We have also chosen to have a relatively relaxed life style compared to other parts of the first world such as the US (with 2-3 weeks paid holiday a year) and parts of Asia. Again this leaves us with less GDP per capita to spend on things like preparing for pandemics.
It is a simplistic conversation to say we have got it wrong and should have been more prepared until you consider what you would have sacrificed to be more prepared. We can only ‘make more money available’ if we have more money or sacrifice something else that we hold dear.
And, finally, FWIW, I suspect we are peaking/have peaked in terms of new infections. Clearly, total infections and deaths will lag this. Imperial believe that the infection rate reached well below 1 after lockdown and our chief scientific officer is cautiously optimistic (and he probably has the best fall real time data).