Belgian here
yeah, the stats are somewhat inflated because of the reporting standard (which essentially was "any death with any respiratory syndrome is a counted as a COVID-19 death). Due to other reporting issues (multiple reporting authorities) that even led to COVID deaths being above excess mortality for a while.
That being said, we didn't do well by far, especially in retirement/elderly care homes. We usually do have a fairly decent affordable (relatively to the rest of the world) care system for elderly people and, imho, it backfired in that particular case. Many of those hospices are fairly linear in design, with a nurse (or eventually nurses + MD, depending on the type of hospice) doing daily tours, visiting each and every resident/patient. PPE equipment shortages made it impossible to swap protective gear on a per patient basis, and the speed at which contamination spread did the rest. I had to spend a couple of mandatory months in one of those "MRS" during my studies and can very well imagine how I could have been an unwilling vector (MRS stands for "house of rest and care" and are dedicated to older people who require medical treatment/monitoring).
We had a relatively strict lockdown which was decently followed and at the beginning of July, we were having only a very low number of cases. That lead to an easing of the lockdown, and the current bounce, which seems to mostly hit a different target. I don't have the time to get into detailed numerical analysis, but current cases seem to be around 20 to 30 times **less** likely to end up in intensive care.
Now, more generally, almost everyone can be unhappy about how some aspects of the pandemic were handled in their home countries. Some people were very "proud" of their country's response or strategy at first, then it soured or backfired. What we have to keep in mind is that we are dealing with a coronavirus that (except for mortality and morbidity) behaves very much like the common cold coronaviruses. That, btw, isn't very positive in terms of immunization and eradication... Governments definitely need to plan and be ready but a lot of the rest is mostly posturing, one way or another.