Worth pointing out the top four states for newly reported deaths today were Arizona, California, Florida and Texas.
All the warning signs are flashing. I personally do not think this is meaningless.
I do fully believe everyone had no clue how bad things were in New York when it shut down. Testing was so poor at the time. Even though there are >50k new cases in the US, I don't think it is yet as bad as the total unaccounted peak numbers in March/April. Instead we are seeing the evolution in more real time of what New York probably actually looked like around the time it was being shut down.
I do hope the awareness and social distancing rules are somewhat better this time around to compensate. Because I cannot imagine what the North Eastern States would have looked like if they refused a shut down. It is undersold that those states were terrible even after unprecedented - albeit late - intervention.