I lean on the side of caution regarding the pandemic. Throughout these last few months, I have remained cautiously optimistic that humanity as a whole will figure out how to work with mutual aid to get ourselves out from an un-salvageable situation. Irrespective of what the media says, the government(s) says, it is important that we each make an informed assessment of our own risk tolerance then decide on what steps to take moving forward.
Without going into the numbers in any specific region, and without mentioning the fact that we have "flare ups" in multiple regions of the world, I came across this visualisation of the global deaths from various causes, animated over time from the beginning of the year to now.
A few thoughts:
It wasn't until the middle of May that COVID became the leading cause of "unnatural" death in the world. This might surprise some people because the bulk of the deaths from places like Europe and the US contributed a large part to the total number, but it is the 3rd world countries like South America, India etc. that have really started going asymptotic later on that makes these figures alarming.
Suicide is no. 2 and actually really quite high irrespective of COVID or not. This is something that is often overlooked because it isn't something that is considered a trans missive disease, but often times, it is the result of structural failure in government policy. This is one of the reasons why it is potentially something we'll have to deal with in the months (and years) to come as we move from battling the immediate effects of the virus, to the "after effects" of the virus.
Despite being the leading cause of death after mid May, it still only represents a small fraction (albeit the last fraction) of the overall number of deaths. The chances of dying to COVID remain low, and many of these causes of deaths are mutually exclusive events, meaning that we actually have a pretty high chance of dying from any one of the other causes of deaths instead of COVID.
It's important also to note, that the number of deaths to COVID are where they are despite a global lockdown. How many more would have died if we didn't go into lockdown? At this point, the Epidemiological models have basically all been shown to be useless so it is anyone's guess as to what that figure might be.
I suspect, that in a decade from now, or sufficiently far into the future, we will look back and see that we did indeed save a great number of lives, but we probably crippled the economy and the well being of people for decades and maybe we might even come to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it.