Florida was hit way earlier. You can see that from the excess mortality graphs here [1].
Here's a cumulative death per capita graph for 5 states that illustrate 5 different patterns [2]. Most states followed one of these patterns.
There is the "New York" pattern: densely populated states with a large elderly population. Hit very hard very early with a very high death rate, but after a couple of months got a handle on it and from then on was about average.
There is the "Washington" pattern: a fairly steady rise in deaths per capita, never quite under control but never really out of hand either.
The "Florida": like Washington for the first 3 or 4 months, then shifts to a more rapid growth, and pretty much stays there.
The "California": 3 or 4 months like Washington, the starts to Florida but gets the rate back down, then spends another 3 or 4 months like Washington (but shifted up because of the burp at 3 or 4 months), but then loses it in the third wave almost catching up to Florida.
The "South Dakota": low population low density state that with reasonable precautions should do better than Washington, but by working really hard to ignore it manage to end up with high numbers.
Use the drop down to flip that graph from total deaths to total cases, and South Dakota is even more striking.
Flip to new cases or new deaths 1 week averages to compare how they all are doing currently. Florida's currently running about 3-4 times the new cases as California, and about 50% more new deaths. (Change the highlight dropdown from "All Highlight & All Current" to "All Current" to make it easier to see the latest values).
It will be interesting to see how vaccination will affect this. With the more easily transmittable variants becoming more common, which also seem to hit younger people more, I've seen the estimates from what we need for herd immunity go up to 80-90% from the early 70% estimates for the original variant.
Overall, there are enough people who say that they will not get vaccinated to make it unlikely that the US can reach that, especially if it turns out to be 90% needed. However, those people are not uniformly distributed among the states. I would not be surprised if in a half a year we end up with two kinds of states: those where it is fully under control due to herd immunity and life has largely returned to normal, and those where it is still sickening and killing a lot of people.
[1] https://www.usmortality.com/
[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...