Remember when people were saying cases were going up but not deaths, so it's OK?

Yeah, back then it was "deaths are going down" vs. "there is a big time lag, just wait." So now we are starting to get through the 3-5 lag between infections being reported and deaths being reported. Here is what the big three (Arizona, Texas and Florida) look like as of a couple days ago:

So now it seems pretty clear that we are not out of the woods yet in terms of deaths. If we let cases increase dramatically we will also see increases in deaths. The only thing that has "gone right" in the past couple of months is that we know more about treatment. That is a definite plus in that it means fewer people with serious complications and fewer dying. But still way too many dying when we could have beaten this a few months ago and had it largely under control. Now it seems like the only way we will ever make this manageable is rapid testing. Even if we get great vaccines 50% of Americans say they won't take one, and the data on immunity seems to indicate it last for at best a bunch of months. So our only hope is to leverage some people getting the vaccine with testing and contact tracing. We will also have the problem of people not being willing to quarantine, but maybe by combining all of these measures we can eventually get a handle on this.