My apologies if the following come across as elementary. It probably is. Sorry.
Some have touched on the problem with interpreting this kind of data. There are several questions that can be asked and the analyst needs to be specific as to which one they are asking.
The New York Times has kept very good records of the the impact of the virus since the beginning. Click on the link below.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...gtype=Homepage
Scroll down to the "Hot Spots" section. Now, look to the right hand side of the page where a gray tone map of the US says "Deaths."
Click on the map
Scroll down to the table section. Go to the end of it and click "show all."
The default time frame of the table is "Recent Trends" and the states are sorted by the number of recent cases. Look at the column headers and click on the one beside "deaths" that says " per 100,000. Now the states are sorted in the descending order of recent fatality rates. IOW, the states with the highest current death rates are at the top.
Michigan is currently the worst off by far with .69 fatalities per 100k per day. Florida comes in at number 4. Its rate is a little less than half Michigan's. Now, scroll down about about 6 more lines an we find New York. Its current daily rate is about 2/3s of Florida's.
So, right now, Florida is having more problems with people dying than the vast majority of all other states. New York is not in great shape, but orders of magnitude better than it was earlier.
OK. Now scroll back to the top of the table. Just above the top of the table is a dialog box. Click on "All time." Now go back over to the "Deaths" column and click on "per 100,000" again.
Now we're looking at the overall death rate since the beginning of the pandemic. Beside the rates are charts showing each state's curve over the course of the pandemic. Topping the list are New Jersey and New York with really high rates. Florida runs middle of the pack, faring better than Texas.
So what does this tell us? Perhaps a couple of things. Comparing states like Texas and Florida's all time number with the northeastern states makes the southern states look better than, perhaps, they are, at least now. The vast majority of the deaths in the NE happened in the early weeks of the pandemic when the virus's behavior was unknown, PPE was in short supply and there were virtually no therapies for infections.
Over time the NE states have figured the virus out a bit and their numbers have come down. Last May, when New York's death rate finally fell a bit, some states, Texas for example took that as a signal that the worst had passed and threw open the doors for Memorial Day. That was an epic blunder.
So, New England got hit hard early, learned a little from their mistakes and their death rates declined. Their state level death curves were pretty flat through the fall and winter even as cases jumped. Other states apparently didn't learn much from NE's experience and had to be taught their own painful lessons. Texas and Florida went to school last summer and, since that wasn't painful enough they got another lesson over the winter.
If you click on the individual states the graphs tell some really interesting stories.