South Korea has dealt the infection extraordinarily well and they have a %1 fatality rate. But even halving my figures, you get an insane result, an overwhelmed health system and so-forth.
The closer you get to affecting the entire population, the less exponential your curve becomes.
True but that STILL bunches up the deaths a lot, until are at a significant fraction of the population, the growth will exponential (and another point of realism, it's city by city also but health care is also city-by-city). The parabola shaped curves in the "don't flatten the curve" articles are bullshit (but the "don't flatten the curves" actions still should be done. It's just the idea that these will be enough that is untenable).
Edit: And I know well there are experts putting forward these arguments. As far as I tell, this an expression of sleep walking, cognitive dissonance or similar phenomena where people don't notice that their mental tools lead them to untenable approaches since they have relied on these tools for quite a while.
Edit2: I think the standard approach of health departments is "when you go past containment, you go to mitigation" and that's what they have been taught. The thing here is nations quickly discover that the situation cannot be mitigated and they have to go to containment on a region or nation wide basis - the situation in Italy, what the situation is becoming in Spain, what literally the situation should be throughout the entire world.
> If you decrease the doubling time of a exponential curve, you still have a situation where most of the area, most of the deaths in this case, is in the last double.
The closer you get to affecting the entire population, the less exponential your curve becomes. Especially if you're assuming that a significant chunk of the population doesn't get infected, you have to have a curve that spends a lot of time slowing down. The max infection rate will be a lot lower than an exponential curve that keeps accelerating until it slams into a brick wall and somehow instantly stops.