No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.
If you start from the premise that a much larger portion of the vulnerable in the US have already been infected, the expectation would be that the gap will only ever narrow, so the direction isn't really an indictment of the policy in Australia, you have to look at where things end up.
I didn't say it was an indictment of Australian policy, and don't think that. But my parent was saying that the gap was unlikely to narrow, which is just wrong.
Besides the statistical anomaly at the end (probably a one time correction for some past cases) the US death rate has always been higher. So the gap has been widening until now. Look at cumulative cases.
Only the derivative of the gap, the daily deaths per capita, has been narrowing. I agree that the daily numbers should become similar when prior immunity due to vaccination or infection becomes similar (all else being equal). But that does not erase the huge amount of deaths before people got their first vaccine.
No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.