FWIW, I think my fav comment i've seen today explaning how things happened has to do with this.
It didn't matter when you re-opened, what mattered is what you did while you were closed and what your plan was when you re-opened.
If you re-opened and didn't really have good plans in place, didn't follow recommendations on what to look for and what measures to achieve before moving forward to the next phase, didn't take the time to set up testing and tracing options -then whenever you chose to re-open you were likely going to have a huge increase in cases eventually. Whether you re-opened in May, whether you re-opened in June.
It matters less when you re-opened than how you re-opened.
I don't really even like the term "re-opened". I think it matters more how and why things were shut down and why and how restrictions were relaxed.
"We must re-open" was based on politics. However, regulations that prevent a father and son from fishing by themselves were not based on science. Such regulations did not prevent one person from being infected. Not relaxing such regulations wasn't based on science, it was based on politics. If politics had been left out of things from both sides, we could have relaxed things that had zero impact on spread of virus much sooner. We could have convinced people that social distancing and wearing masks were the key to getting things closer to normal. Instead we dug into extreme positions that don't help anything.
It went something like this:
"We must 're-open'"
"Not only can we not 're-open', you still cannot go fishing with your son or go to your vacation house to make sure the basement hasn't been flooded, and keeping you from driving to your vacation house is based on SCIENCE."
"You are an idiot and I am going to do whatever I want to do. You can't stop me, even if I want to enter your property and do what I want to do"
"OMG the world is ending"
We should all really step back and look at the current situation. What can we do to prevent/slow the spread of the virus without locking ourselves in our residences. Let's work on doing those things instead of arguing about how we got to where we are.