"The goal posts were not changed. Once the curve was flattend, the lockdowns were lifted, and measures relaxed."
I think you should tell that to the residents of New York City, who only today got back the privilege of eating indoors (and only at 25% capacity). The governor wouldn't have granted that, had he not been sued (twice). The case count has been flat since June:
If you count cases by specimen date (when they were taken) and not by reporting date (when the results were known), the picture is a little different: while high, cases seem (too early to be sure) to have plateaued around the end of August.
Hmmm, interesting. Its very difficult to make comparisons with wave 1 though, as we presumably had the same number of asymptomatics, but with the much lower levels of testing, we didn't find any of them.
The third wave will probably be a lot easier to model (god, I wish I was joking on that).
I find this talk of first/second wave misleading. This is not the flu for mortality, and it is not an influenza virus. It spreads differently.
Some people at my institution in fact have argued that you should not use flu-derived models, but instead model the spread and the outbreaks in similar ways to SARS and MERS, which rather than big "waves", had a series of spaced outbreaks. At an internal seminar they showed that at least their models for the Bergamo area seemed to be consistent with the actual data.
I think you should tell that to the residents of New York City, who only today got back the privilege of eating indoors (and only at 25% capacity). The governor wouldn't have granted that, had he not been sued (twice). The case count has been flat since June:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page