Results take time to come in. The latest week’s results are therefore always quite low.
There is in the past few days a cresting of the “third wave” (actually, 2nd), but nothing like you’re seeing, and not in deaths yet.
Definitely the second wave. The second bump was the first wave hitting the states that hadn’t seen any activity yet (primarily midwestern states). There’s even some of that still happening now.
The second wave is where the activity has started picking up in places that already got hit in April/May. It’s probably going to roller-coaster through the end of this year until the vaccines get widely deployed. We should have 4 safe and effective vaccine options approved and available by January. Medical personnel and VIPs will get the first doses, but they’ve been making hundreds of millions of doses and President Trump bought a good chunk of them, so Americans get priority.