Even if that (EDIT: ‘that’ being an idea that virus has been circulating for months) were true (which almost certainly it is not), so what? The only logical explanation for this is that percentage of severe cases relative to totally susceptible and infected is orders of magnitude lower, and now the total number of infected is so large that number of severe cases is starting to get noticeable. But that is not the picture we are getting from South Korea that had much more comprehensive testinG.

> Even if that were true (which almost certainly it is not)

What are you referring to? You don’t think the virus is already much more widespread in the US than currently reported numbers? I’m just making the observation that perhaps the large increases in US cases are more indicative of confirmation of already existing cases rather than necessarily being _new_ cases.

I am not arguing that virus is more widespread than the reported numbers, that much is obvious. I was replying to the idea that virus has been circulating “for months” undetected. With a doubling time of 5 days or so, with “for months” circulation we would be in a totally different territory right now.

> I was replying to the idea that virus has been circulating “for months” undetected.

I don’t think that’s crazy at all. We had our first case sometime in January, and only until very very recently have we had any significant travel restrictions. It’s very contagious and for a significant number of people there are no real symptoms, or if there are, nothing life threatening. I don’t think it’s crazy at all that it’s been working it’s way around the US population for months.

Maybe to put it another way, if we could instantly test al 300+M Americans right this instant, would you be surprised if say 20M or so tested positive or had had it?

> would you be surprised

Yes, I would be very surprised. Given what we know about severity distribution that means 2M hospitalizations and ~200K-1M ICU cases that we somehow missed.