I have a science background (math/physics undergrad degree at Harvard), and I currently work as an technology exec at a health tech startup, so I do my own analyses of the data, and to put it briefly, and I don't want to get into a long debate about this here, since it's not the right forum for it (and I don't understand why this has become such a political topic, because it shouldn't be), but let me just clarify what I am saying.
As for death rates -- yes, Belgium has a higher per capita death rate. But Belgium is country of 11 million people, which is half the size of New York State. If you list out US states as though they were countries, the top 6 "countries" in per capita death rate in the world would be US states. I don't know why there's any debate at all about lockdowns --- the evidence is utterly overwhelming that they not only work but they've worked in the past. I don't get this from "the media" but from the scientific literature and the data. Some studies:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/e...201-7/fulltext https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227592/ https://link.springer.com/article/10...58-020-00596-3 However, lockdowns have varied greatly in different countries and in the US, ours has been one of the weakest, probably because they are neither strict enough nor did people follow them enough.
But more importantly, death rates have gone back up since their low in early July -- most of the accurate models say we will be at around 230K deaths by November 1. Not exactly back to normal. Deaths will level off and go down a bit starting around now but it's not gonna be business as usual until 2021 in my view. Early 2021? Summer? Who knows. Depends on vaccines, treatments, etc. But not normal for some time.
One of the most accurate models, which I like to reference (though it doesn't take into account any therapeutic breakthroughs that might happen):
https://covid19-projections.com