Pandemics, emergencies, and tragedies are usually what gives us the best indication of what our politicians actually want. For some strange reason, it's not usually the will of the people...
It’s not that more disease and death is desired by one side, rather there’s political momentum behind not believing that it’s as severe as it’s being reported.
We no longer live in a world with shared truths, and this is the most remarkable manifestation of this new reality.
Duranty got the prize for being one of a very small number of Western journalists allowed into Stalin's Soviet Union, and writing about a visit to Ukraine.
He made no mention of the mass famine ongoing at the time, the Holomodor. Wikipedia lists the death toll as "3 to 12 million", because it was a totalitarian state and real measurement was impossible.
So the answer to "is it possible for millions to die and it simply not be reported at the time" is "yes".
Being allowed to return to work or a business you run, being able to pay rent, feed your family, etc.
These are positive outcomes of lockdowns being lifted.
The danger in looking at this as a binary “opening kills people” is that you miss the trade offs and in doing so you miss the other nuanced policy options that sit in between complete lockdown and no lockdown.
It's possible that "looser lockdown with mandatory masks" might work - it seems to have done so in Eastern Europe and some of the South Asian countries. But for some reason that doesn't seem to be on the agenda in the US or UK?