I don't see where 400 comes from.

If we assume that people who died today now are 1% of those who got it 20 days ago, then that is a factor of 100. Project that forward through 4 doublings for the fact that we have about 20 days of doubling every 5 days and we get to a factor of 1600. You can complicate the toy model in a number of ways, but I can't get it as low as 400.

Anyways it is worth pointing out that the curve of reported cases will continue rising for a couple of weeks as people both get symptoms then get sick enough to come to the attention of hospitals. And if the measures work, it won't be obvious from death rates for about 4 weeks. And at that point the critical question is whether we managed to slow the rise, or create an exponential decline.

My bet is that we are only going to get a slow in the rise. Hopefully enough for us to get ahead of the need for emergency treatments.

Look at the curves for every where else on the planet, the US will be the same, take it seriously

Except this is extrapolating ahead to assume no changes to treatment available. As time progresses, we find better, more effective ways to prevent death from COVID-19.

But even our dutch government is claiming it's 4 days standing in front of a chart where it's obviously 2 days.

After you reach the limit it's hard to count because people stop going to the hospital that can't take them in anyway. At that point you should just consider any increase in deaths compared to the normal the result of Corona. Wether it's a cancer treatment that got postponed because of Corona or Corona itself.

People count bodies much more reliably in pandemics. I don’t trust our confirmed case telemetry data much, but I do trust the fatality data. Unfortunately it’s about a two to four week lagging indicator. But the fatality rates also currently show this to be spreading much, much faster than it ever spread in Wuhan.

Wuhan is what happens when the curve is flattened. Not what happens when you don’t.

The issue here is every death is attributed to COVID-19 if the virus is present even if the actual reason is some other underlying health condition. Given that most victims are elderly and had serious pre-existing conditions this leads to massive mortality rate over-estimation.

You also cannot reliably compare EU/US data with Chinese: initially most deaths and cases of pneumonia in China were attributed to other illnesses. Secondly, Chinese government is notorious for flat-out lying in their official stats.

That what you claim provably doesn't happen. Even old people simply don't die that fast otherwise, and we also have the data of the people who can't breath and have to be admitted to the hospitals: there were never that many cases before, happening that fast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Is_COVID-19_like_a_flu%3F...

(the numbers were compared by the Italian National Biotechnology Association, each bar is one week of time)

Scroll down to "Daily New Cases in the United States". No real need to extrapolate data from other countries. New cases are doubling every 2-3 days.

So that 400 multiplier gives the number of cases as of 3 weeks prior to the death count used in the calculation?

This is the situation with tested cases now. You can assume that there is no nation on earthq where the number of tested cases is an accurate representation of what is really going on. Deaths are far more accurate but lag behind ehat is going on by two weeks. And two weeks is a long time with something that grows exponentially.

The bad thing about this is, that this logic is flipped on it's head at times: my girlfriend had all the symptoms just like 6 of her alumni — not a single of them could get tested. And while they where still in bed their university proudly issued a press statement stating they have zero cases of Corona. Yeah — if you are not testing you will have zero confirmed cases, that is the way it is.

The dangerous thing here isn't the current number of cases, but the insecurity about it. If you have a huge number of people starting to get ill today your hospitals will fall apart in two weeks time. Doctors will have to send people home to die, like in Italy visitora can no longer be handled, people no lomger be burried — this is not a joke.

It's true though that they aren't using the highest rate they could (the 20% per day we got before social distancing). I hope that closing the schools helps... and the ICUs don't overflow immediately.

But information on testing numbers is also lagging and incomplete. The CDC was doing over 5k tests per day a week ago when the number of new cases was around 500 per day. And the number of tests were exponentially increasing too. Does anyone have any better info about how much we have ramped up testing since then? It's a big country, and there's huge "publication bias" in the media where stories about a location or person running into testing issues get the attention and stories where things are working do not. I really don't trust anyone's ability to assess the situation at the resolution of 24 hours and make anything like an accurate prediction. I would like to see them just do full-on statistical sampling by testing people at random in different cities.

With California at 1060, then I can only imagine where the final number will land. And New York has 5712 infected, and yet, they still haven’t shut down the state.

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Now, the following is likely incorrect, but this may give an general idea of the magnitude. But doing a basic extrapolation, China had a 160x multiplier, from the initial lockdown point, to get to 80,000 infected.

If we use that, then at this point, California might register about 169,000 infected. And New York, if they lock down now, might register 914,000 infected.

Sobering numbers indeed..

But these numbers are highly dependent on population density, mass transportation patterns, and social congregation scenarios. Wuhan has high speed trains, but California has Southwest planes. Car travel and ride sharing usage might be similar. So it’s unlikely the numbers are similar to compute.

At some point, the medical system will fail, and everyone will just give up, and we are now left to our own fate.