No second wave, just a differently timed wave rippling through a huge country

It can seem like we’re experiencing a second wave of the coronavirus, but there’s a lot of conflicting data. Case counts are rising, but some of that is due to testing. Importantly, deaths are not rising. And then some of the charts you see play games with the x-axis.

So, what’s really going on? Below are some charts that together tell a story something like this: America is too big a country to consider as a single pool of cases, hospitalizations, or deaths. There never was a nationwide outbreak of the virus, although the media based in the Acela corridor spoke as if there were one. There’s not really a second wave now nationwide.