If you don’t believe in any god, not in a force that acts through everything, not in anything sentient with a will and powers that influences our lives, then you are probably an atheist. There is as wide a variety of atheists as there are people who do believe in a god or gods. Even within followers of religions, like for example the Roman Catholic church, there are atheists. This is because some people see the benefit of catholicism but don’t see any evidence of the existence of a god and don’t deem it necessary to even assume it. The core of Judaism has no god. It assumes ‘god’ is ‘in everything’, which speaks more about how a person sees the world. The god of the old testament is for the ‘dumb’ jews.
If you are an atheist you have expectation of entering heaven or hell after you die. You don’t have to hope or fear during your life, and your behaviour can be motivated by your own experiences and judgements. If you judge by how few people listen to warnings (about climate change) you can expect that even a very ‘religious’ person indoctrinated from birth will in the end just follow his/her heart. Crime rates are not lower in religious countries as far as we know. People are only happier in religious countries that have a thriving economy.
When it comes to the corona pandemic atheist seem to be better of than believers. The response ranges from outright denial of vulnerability to the virus by both muslim and christian leaders, to pretending to cure or protect against it to rationally advising physical distancing. An atheist can see that only when the best medical advice is followed, and one listens to the science (and allows medical professionals to do their job) you can expect the least suffering or risk of death during this calamity. Having been indoctrinated to believe in a god increased your risk of death on average.
There is a middle category one could identify within the religious realm, which is people that try to follow the behaviours of their god or religious figure. People that do that can definitely be atheists. If you follow the new testament teachings of Jezus, you may or may not believe he is the son of god, you can still do as he did. This is different even from following rules set out by a god (or prophet) of which there can be many that can never be lived by one individual (say rules about what men should do and women should do). It is way easier to make rules than to live by a specific set of rules. Some christian priests followed the behaviour of Jezus and visited the sick to console them, and died from being contaminated with the virus.
As atheist you can conclude that religions are a risk, that its priests can turn into dangerous charlatans causing many deaths. If you wished to protect yourself against religious denial of what seems safe to do on an empirical basis, its not sure how to go about it. The same argument holds if you consider other believes a risk, for instance the believe that economic growth is good, or the belief that everyone should be a muslim. Dangerous beliefs are everywhere, and time and time again the people that follow reason and empirical evidence have to fix things for them, that is atheists.