We're at over 2,000 cases per day just in Arizona. This past Friday we hit a new state high at 3,200+. Unlike your opening, we got open pretty fast here, and the results are unsurprisingly catastrophic. It took our governor a long time to finally decide that face masks must be worn in public, but I don't know who's enforcing it, and while more people have them on, certainly not everyone.
Sounds like your government (Singapore, right? I forget) is being much more shrewd. While you make them sound a lot more authoritarian than the States, I don't think it's unreasonable to be taking the levels of caution that they are where you're at. Hearing the stories of how quickly some people go from admission in the hospital to death is chilling.
I think this is really testing our sense of morality. It's true that only a small proportion of people are getting infected and dying, but life as usual would obviously increase that exponentially, AND you start to talk about preventable deaths as being acceptable. I've seen too many comments on the internet resigned to the fact that "we all have to die some day." Easy to say if it's not you doing the dying, right?