As we have seen in South Korea, vs Italy and Iran what makes a difference is hospitals not being over whelmed with critical cases and availability of mechanical ventilators. What impacts that? Number of infected people! Let's say 2% of everyone who gets infected needs critical care. Out of those 1% will die even with help. If it's not available 5%. If there are 1000 cases it's 20 people critically ill. Let's say we only have 20 ICU beds with mechanical ventilators and they are free, so .2 people will die. Now let's say we have 100000 cases. That's 2000 people needing ICU. We still only have 20 beds. So we put 20 of those, now doctors need to choose, in ICU. Out of those .2 will die, so basically 0. That leaves 1980 people. Most will recover, but now death probability is 5%. That's 99 people dead.
Hopefully I didn't mess up on math, but it illustrates a point: number of deaths directly depends on number of cases and availability of critical care. So saying "look at deaths" is kind of a meaningless statement.