From what I see around me there a huge number of unfilled jobs because people are making more money from unemployment than from jobs.
Yes, the job could pay more, but that has its own set of pros and cons. It's almost acting like a backdoor minimum wage, but worse, because some people would rather make a bit less and not work at all. (I'm not saying that's you - I'm talking in generalities here.)
If the extra unemployment benefits from the CARES Act was just changing the unemployment pay to 100% your prior pay, it wouldn’t’ve been as big an issue. But for someone making $300 a week could possibly get $800 through unemployment (~$200 for unemployment plus $600 “bonus”).
The CARES Act suspending the “search for work” requirement didn’t help either. It was necessary at the time as there were no jobs available, but I think it is definitely time to reevaluate that. It encourages people to not go back when the business opens up because they’ll not only have to go back to work, but they’ll be making less.
It takes a one mutation to make current vaccines ineffective. We also don't know how long immunity will last. If it's only a year or two then without eradicating everywhere it won't go away in the US either.
Also, IIRC the CARES Act suspended the requirement to look for more work if you've been furloughed/laid off. A friend of mine who works in a restaurant was getting paid more to go surf at the beach than he used to get paid to go to work. When his employer opened up, my friend was understandably not motivated to get scheduled for very many shifts.
USA is still #3 in the world for cases per day.
Countries with slightly fewer cases than USA (Turkey, France, Germany) all have MUCH smaller populations so it doesn't make sense to say they're doing "better"
>Would it be better to point out that just under a 1000 people a day are still dying from it in the US?
No, any sort of absolute count is going to be equally misleading. For example my city had 5 covid deaths yesterday. Does that mean that we're 200x safer than the rest of the US? Of course not, it just means that you're comparing two populations of different size.
>What's the better metric?
Anything that's normalized by population size. For example per capita new cases or per capita deaths.
The question was rhetorical. There is no better metric for showing the pandemic is still on going. If you have 50k cases a day, and 1000 deaths a day, it doesn't matter if other countries are lower or higher, it's clearly on going.
How many deaths per day would you use as a threshold for being past the middle of the pandemic?