I think you should tell that to the residents of New York City, who only today got back the privilege of eating indoors (and only at 25% capacity). The governor wouldn't have granted that, had he not been sued (twice). The case count has been flat since June:
There's a really good FT article on this here: https://www.ft.com/content/b9653470-8779-4037-86ad-96edfcd6f...
Overall, Madrid opened much quicker and is now in the grip of another outbreak.
See https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/spains-outbreak-updated-on-reg... for some discussion (two weeks old though, so beware).
The third wave will probably be a lot easier to model (god, I wish I was joking on that).
Some people at my institution in fact have argued that you should not use flu-derived models, but instead model the spread and the outbreaks in similar ways to SARS and MERS, which rather than big "waves", had a series of spaced outbreaks. At an internal seminar they showed that at least their models for the Bergamo area seemed to be consistent with the actual data.
The U.S. is a very different picture, in many states the first wave never really went away.