Several things: 1)The municipality in Maryland is Anne Arundel county which has a well-to-do population in a state that is overall on the high end of most of the social and economic bell curves, so rates of infection and mortality are likely lower there than many other areas of the US. 2) the US as a whole is less healthy than Australia with a much less effective chronic-care healthcare system.
The picture presented by the article sums up what happens to a first-world country with a broken healthcare system and an administration wholly unprepared for any sort of calamity, much less a pandemic that cuts across all geographical lines in ways that a natural disaster does not.
My 18 year-old son is already preparing for the eventuality of distance learning for his first year of college, in which case he’s going to take a gap year and start in 2021.
Screw it, let’s move to Australia. Reality in the US is that the current administration has no idea what it’s doing or how to control COVID.