Purely anecdotal but I was in Costa Rica in September of 2020. I was struck by the difference and better preparedness compared to the US.

Every store and place of business had not only signs and hand sanitizer at the entrance, nobody was in stores without masks, and I drove by a line of people over half a mile long and 3-4 people deep, of people waiting in line for hours to get vaccinated.

The taxi driver told me there was some program to provide vaccines to CR and what he did was stay in line and hold the place for his family for awhile and then they would wait in line allowing him to work for awhile. Overall they took public safety measures much more seriously than the US, but I was in a wealthier urban area, don't know how it was in the rural areas.

A better term would be "developing nations" . The term " third world" refers to not being part of NATO (or not aligned to NATO), and is outdated. Also, there are various sorts of developing countries, richer, poorer, and some are war or conflict zones.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro denied it was a thing and fight any measure trying to curb its impact. State governments, who admin the healthcare systems on their States, could see that covid were fucking up the Healthcare system and had to fight the federal government to do anything. A lot of people died, and that mf almost got re elected.

Speaking to a couple international students from Nigeria a while back - very poorly.

The conspiracy theories were rampant. Especially in the more tribal / rural areas.

Death everywhere.

A lot of countries in South America had very strict rules. Double-mask requirements, mandatory vaccines, stay-at-home days. What they perhaps lacked in access to vaccines, they tried to make up with those stricter rules. They also made deals with China & Russia for their vaccines, in lieu of limited access to Pfizer etc.

Each one in a different way.

Having looked at this table, it would seem that western countries are at the top of the list when sorted by deaths per million.

However, I don’t think the poor countries even had the resources to collect realistic statistics nor the will to report them honestly. I would only use this table for comparing similar pairs of countries against each other. Comparing wealthy contents with poor ones doesn’t appear to make much sense.

My guess is that poor countries handled it badly, and these statistics don’t even begin to tell how bad it was. Then again, what can you expect when you don’t have many hospitals, nor the money for vaccinating everyone.