Yes, the data suggest that in the hardest hit states, rates really are coming down, fairly steadily. There will be bumps in the road. But the case rates are going up in the states that reopening, of course (to be expected). We don't know how quickly they'll go up. We have to keep in mind that this disease grows exponentially. Look at the church in Butte County, California. They jumped the gun, decided to have a Mother's Day church service, and 180 new cases resulted from just that single 2 hour event.
Having someone breathing, while closer to you than 6 meters, it takes about 14 minutes to gather enough virions in your membranes (especially your eyes) to contract the disease.
And while certainly, this is an age-graded disease, the median age is lower in the US and UK than elsewhere, due to underlying conditions. So, in states where the rates of underlying conditions (like diabetes) are already high, there will be higher mortality. 25% of the CoVid dead in the US are diabetics, and the age range for them is much different than for people-at-large.
So let's say we have a long tail of (optimistically) 1000 deaths per day. That's 250 diabetics per day. If 250 people were being hit as pedestrians per day, we'd be shocked and call for major changes in street design and so forth. We'd warn people not to cross the street until the problem was solved.
And when a person decided to cross the street, the ensuing death would be only theirs - not impacting health or mortality for the non-crossers (so CoVid entails even more personal responsibility than car driving or walking across intersections).
1000 deaths per day is 30,000 deaths per month (approximately the entire number of ANNUAL deaths in car accidents, pedestrians included).
At what point will it be "few enough" deaths? 15,000 a month is still a lot. It would remain the leading healthcare nightmare in the US for years, pushing other illnesses to the bottom of the list and reshaping how preventive medicine works and which doctors stay in business.
BTW, many jurisdictions don't report deaths on the weekends (my county doesn't). It takes 3-7 days for symptoms to show up, which is what prompts people to go get tested and the case rate to go up. States have barely reopened.
It's entirely too early to make any claims about reopening. But I will say that I'm very interested in overall mortality rates, in the end. Georgia's rate looks to be about 14 deaths per 100,000 residents - so if it were on the international list, by itself, that would be very low. I hope that helps contextualize their eagerness to reopen.
Michigan's is closer to 50 in 100,000. Concerning.
I've posted links about these topics before. The data on deaths per place are publicly available and posted many times a day here (worldometer is a good source or just Google "Covid _______ state name."
But one can easily see how even Michigan pales in comparison to places with ~500 deaths per 100,000. US as a whole is 260 per 100,000 last time I checked. If we backed New York out of that data, it would be ~125, IIRC.
