We’re at a steady state of 500-1000 deaths per day and will probably hold at that until an effective vaccine comes.
Curious why you think it will hold this high. From what I can tell, most developed nations have fallen to relatively low daily death numbers (below 50) despite reopening for several months now. I think the US just took longer as its geography is so wide, it essentially had to go through multiple waves. Do you expect NY to have another huge wave? Surely various degrees of herd immunity is slowing things to some extent.
I agree over time it will slow down, but have two theories:
1) There are still large parts of our geography that have not had significant exposures. There was another thread we were discussing why the simplistic time-dependent epidemiologic models aren't working for our country because they don't account for cross-population infection (someone from Pop B goes to Pop A, which is recovering, and restarts the spread) and also don't account for relaxation of lockdowns (which are necessary to keep the economy functioning). If we had a big spike in all the states simultaneously in the spring, I'd expect things to drop off rapidly as the susceptible people across the US would have been exposed and subsequent precautions were taken to slow down spread afterwards. Since we didn't there are the multiple waves that in aggregate look like a longer tail.
2) I've noticed recently what I call a death lag. Basically, in the NE death rates closely followed infection rates, and dropped rapidly afterwards. (NY, NJ, CT in the graph attached). However, in the latest round (CA, TX, FL, AZ) only AZ had a drop off. The other three are still on a plateau for deaths.
Explanation 1: Part of this is overwhelmed coroner's offices for report issuances, so we will have to see if in retrospect this is an artifact. If the latter, then when cases are re-analyzed it'll show a sharper peak in deaths with a faster downslope like seen in the Northeast.
Explanation 2: The other possibility is better management of the acute instability we see with COVID ICU patients, with subsequent later deaths. This is called the second peak phenomena, where we got people through the acute illness but then some BS other problem takes them out during recovery (PE, heart attack, ventilator-associated pneumonia, etc). It sucks and happens often in critically ill patients who survive the initial sepsis. We are seeing more of these now.