See and interact with the figure here.
The Y axis is death rate per million, that is, how quickly people are dying in a country, normalized for population. The X axis is cumulative deaths per million, that is, how many people have died to-date, normalized for population. Each line travels exclusively rightward, and you'll see a hump when the virus is spreading (or, more specifically, killing people), and the line will drop off when the virus is essentially under control. "Flattening the curve" only keeps the line low, but what really matters is how far right a country gets. If lots of people died, just very slowly, then nothing you did probably mattered.
Some oddities to be aware of:
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Belgium counts suspected COVID deaths, not only people who tested positive for COVID before or after death. As reasonable as this may or may not be, it makes their plot look WAY worse than any other country. Take that with a grain of salt.
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Peru... I haven't looked into it yet. Their plot looks horrible. It's probably not actually that bad. No idea.
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There are some stray lines for most countries. I don't know where this is coming from, but would happily accept a PR that fixes this.