Applied to US data... 21 deaths today. 14% daily increase, doubling time of 5.2 days (2 week lag; hopefully social distancing has lengthened it since then). Assuming 1% fatality, that would mean 2100 "actual" cases two weeks ago. Assume no social distancing and doubling time of 5.2 days, or say it doubled three times in two weeks and you get 16,800 cases today. But we've already got 11k confirmed cases today, and I can't believe our confirmed count has already caught up that much.

I dunno, maybe that's an indication that the fatality rate is lower than 1%. Or that dying takes longer than 14 days.

Then once you have 2 weeks of death data you can't get the transmission rate. Finally you could go to Seattle and sample 50k people to see how many were infected with a serology test to further refine the 1% assumption