Your actual death toll is influenced by many different factors. The age of your population and how well your medical infrastructure can handle the sick will sway things a lot. Many of the Asian countries were hit by SARS so they had a lot of experience preparing for something like this. By acting early and getting ahead of the epidemic, you can drastically reduce the rate of infection and avoid overburdening your health systems. This is why many of the Asian countries have around 0.5% to 1% death rates. South Korea was actually doing very well and had things contained until patient 31 infected THOUSANDS of people, so they are pretty much an outlier in that region. But even then they are still at 0.5%. They were prepared.
Italy was hit really hard because they took too long to act on the issue and their health system collapsed after becoming way too overburdened. When you reach a point where doctors have to pick and choose who gets to live and die because you don't have enough machines for the extremely sick, your mortality rates jump. It wasn't until that happened that Italy realized that the only way to defeat the exponential growth of the virus at that point was to contain it hard and lock down the whole country. Many other countries are on exponential growth cycles still (the USA included). The countries who are not prepared are looking at 3% to 5% death rates. It will grow out of control and the hospitals won't have the equipment necessary to save everyone. The USA as a whole as under 300 ECMO units, and some cases are severe enough to require their use.
My sources came from here:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo...