> It's interesting that the NE states seem to now be lauded when actually NJ, NY, MA and CT have the highest per-capita death rates [0] in the WORLD [1] by far despite significant lockdowns, comprehensive & early mask mandates and fairly conservative reopening (e.g. NYC).

Back-modeling what happened in those states showed that the biggest problem those areas had is that (in New York, for example) when they thought they had Case Number 1 on March 1 they already had Case Number 10,000.

Even as late as March 15th, people in the New York mayor and governor's offices were screaming at each other because the data wasn't matching up and cases were appearing with no traceable cause--ie. general populace circulation was occurring.

The problem was that those areas needed to be locking down as of March 1 but because of poor data didn't get locked down until about 3 weeks later. This wasn't unusual: things like SXSW were still playing chicken with everybody until Austin pulled the plug on them--that was only like March 6th or so. And that's not a lockdown, that's just stopping an international travel event.

The sad part is that several states are about to surpass those per capita death numbers for RI, MA, and CT. That's inexcusable at this point.

And I really hope that no other state gets close to NY or NJ numbers. Sadly, unless a couple of those states do something NOW, they're going to.

This is nonsense. You completely disregard that the entire world's medical community has become vastly better at treating infectious people. In the early days, when NE states, Spain, Italy, etc. were hit hard, people who had to go to the hospital died at alarming rates. Since then, we have learned that prone position, dexamethasone, supplemental (non-intubated) oxygen, convalescent plasma, etc. contribute to vastly lower death rates. Of course per capita death rates are high in the NE states. We had no effective treatments then.

Minor note on Europe - Several European countries relaxed border travel restrictions and internal restrictions on dining / socializing in June in time for traditional summer holidays in July / August. Current surges are likely to be a result of relaxing of previous lockdown rules. For an early discussion of this see [1]

[1] https://fortune.com/2020/08/15/europe-covid-cases-second-wav...