Please keep in mind also, that for states that are not in (NY, NJ, CA, MI, LA) there hasn't been a _first wave_. We need to keep that in mind before we point to states like FL and GA as having a 2nd wave. Their waves were largely curtailed by the stay-home orders in place. We need to either admit we want these orders to last until there is a vaccine, or increase our threshold for acceptable case levels.
Now there’s superficial (early) evidence that many of the low-cases states are entering a second stage of exponential growth. There may not be much room for us to simply manage the caseload at some “acceptable level” if those states really catch fire. The problem is that the only tool we have to manage this — if indeed it bears out and hospitals become overwhelmed - is another lockdown. But the lockdowns have become a political hot potato, and at least one side is dead-set against them. It seems unlikely that we’ll be able to use this tool again until things get Very Bad.
Compare this to most of continental Europe, where both high-case and low-case nations have succeeded with lockdowns, and governments are moving into a phase where careful management is likely to control the epidemic entirely going forward.