It can be deceptive depending on your local area, as well as just exhausting to hear so many times. For example, if you live in New York, yesterday's death toll was 7% of the highest day its ever been.
Wave 1: NY + NJ (some other northeast)
Wave 2: Florida + Texas + Arizona (most of south)
Wave 3: Midwest
You can even see this within California. Wave 1: Bay Area, Wave 2: Some LA, Wave 3: All SoCal
Each wave basically amounts of when that population gave up distancing, and once you’ve undergone your wave, you don’t really get it that bad again. (unless you have a small wave that misses much of the population, like LA)
Texas’ wave 3 is popping in different cities than wave 2 (Texas, like Cali, is just huge).
Edit: While deaths yesterday are only a little above the deaths from the April peak, cases yesterday are 6 times as high.
Even when the death rates are super scary, people still don't follow common sense measures. Remember the so-called lockdowns in the USA? Everyone was still out horsing around, getting together, buying their khakis, eating at whatever restaurants they could find that were open. There was no enforcement, so nobody followed the rules. What a surprise!
Even now, where the disease is arguably worse than it's ever been, local governments are talking about opening up schools and other indoor super-spreader businesses like bars and night clubs. In most places, churches, with their saliva-fest indoor singing and chanting, are fully open. Nobody is taking sane measures at the arguable height of the pandemic!
If we learned anything from this pandemic, we learned that we can't rely on people voluntarily acting collectively to make things better for everyone.