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?
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.