As others have pointed out:
Deaths to number of cases is a metric that tells you how well our health care experts are doing in saving lives of cases that enter hospitals.
Deaths to your population (or to per 100k/1 million as in per capita) is a metric showing how well you’re doing in keeping your citizens safe from getting covid19 and dying.
We’re doing better on the former than the latter, but that’s an uneven metric as some states are doing better than others depending on what populations were hard hit.