Anecdotal, I know, but FWIW:
I've posted the Kinsa HealthWeather link every now and then. Flu-like illnesses remain well below averages.
If an outbreak is bound to hit, it is best that it hits in the summer, since other seasonal illnesses are at their minimums. Part of the reason New York hit capacity is because they couldn't tell COVID from the tail end of the seasonal flu and were still dealing with both. We don't have that crisis right now. There are virtually no other illnesses going around.
The only places on Kinsa's map showing any remarkable amount of above-average illness are Austin and San Antonio. Some scattered counties in the south, along with the Central Valley and Bay Area in California, are up to near-average. It's striking, really, to see how much of a difference the media narrative, enabled by Johns Hopkins, differs from the reality on the ground.
Somewhere along the line, the goalposts shifted from preventing the hospital system from overloading to "stop the virus at all costs, however long it takes." Considering how badly things are going in Mexico, the latter was never an option, especially considering it has generally worked best in East Asia and Oceania, which is all either islands (Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia) or isolated peninsulae (Vietnam, South Korea)—where the threat of it being reintroduced across land borders is nil. There's a lot more control over who gets into your country in such a situation. The only places that have that kind of advantage here in the western hemisphere are Newfoundland (which has been practically COVID-free for months now) and the Caribbean.
There was another map somewhere showing doctors' visits, but I don't remember where that one is.
