If we succeed at slowing the growth, even stopping it, then thank god those hospitals will remain empty.
e.g. here's German data:
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/infizierte-pro-tes...
and US data:
https://twitter.com/FScholkmann/status/1246122535793680386
It looks like it doubles every few days because of the rapid increase in testing.
Moreover these hospitals are now entering their second week of being idled. They should be very busy by now if the sick were really growing exponentially - they're still mostly empty.
Even in New York you see this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8173563/Elmhurst-ta...
"New York City's Elmhurst hospital - the 'epicenter of the epicenter' - is now receiving fewer patients but they are arriving sicker, doctor warns, as he says some come in with no symptoms other than diarrhea then test positive"
"He said testing was surprising and that some people show up with a fever and cough but test negative. Others who are there for different ailments - like car accident victims - end up testing positive."
New York is supposed to be the epicentre of the outbreak yet the most overloaded hospital is now seeing fewer patients arrive than before. That's not consistent with being at the start of a very long exponential growth phase (it obviously can't grow exponentially forever so this discussion is only about how long it lasts in that phase and where the peak is).
Edit: got throttled, will reply to Joe here
Many sources show only the number of positive cases and deaths. Here's one that shows total tests performed in the USA:
https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily
On the 5th April 2020 there were 332,308 positive cases in the USA. So the halving point was between 29th and 30th March (139,061 and 160,530 cases respectively). It took about 5 days to double.
On the 5th April 2020 there were 1.42 million negative cases. On 29th March 2020 there were 692,290 negatives or 48% of the figure today. It took exactly the same amount of time to double.
So we can see that number of tests doubled in that time. Total tests went from 831,351 (47%) to 1,762,032.
The proportion of positive to negative cases is 18% today. On the 29th March it was 16%. A 2% rise, nothing even close to doubling. The graph in the tweet I linked to shows this visually - a fairly smooth and slow increase over time. We think it's spreading exponentially because of misuse of data, but all that's actually growing exponentially is testing. And yes - that's probably why there are now global shortages of reagents and other ingredients for tests. You can't keep globally doubling demand for tests without eventually hitting production limits!
Look at the worldwide data, then at the data for pretty much every country: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Its geometric growth pretty much any place you look. Now, unless testing were proceeding completely uniformly across the board, its hard to imagine that explains any of this.
This is an example of how you are making straw man arguments. No-one is arguing that the growth rate will continue to be exponential in the face of effective mitigation.
We're not testing the general population. Its testing of folks coming to a hospital? Folks who aren't having hospitalizing symptoms are not tested at all, and sent home to quarantine.
So if tests doubled that means that folks are feeling bad at an increased rate. Showing up at a hospital with alarming symptoms.
You can finagle the statistics both ways - by ignoring what the 'test sample' is and assuming its uniform for instance.
You're right that it's not a uniform sample, but the consistency across the world is very suggestive. Not everywhere has test shortages.
There's clearly a virus spreading. It sends some people to hospital. Quite a few viruses do that.
Unlike those, this virus is different in one key way - governments have decreed that any death where the virus is present is counted as a "virus death", and have decreed mass testing to find infections. Consider a virus that is not really dangerous but highly infectious, like any common cold or flu. Then many people will turn up at hospital with it, but in reality their problem is something else. With our current data that would look like hospitals being flooded in a way never seen before, but it'd be a data artifact, not something real.
As for countries having to build makeshift hospitals, two things:
1. Local overloads happen during bad flu seasons too. You can find many reports in the past about wards being converted, tents being constructed to hold patients on the streets from earlier flu pandemics. Arguably making quick hospitals to handle that sort of bad flu season should be a more common practice.
2. No country anywhere is experiencing general overload. Even in Italy, a few days ago a politician was publicly asking why they're sending patients to Germany when in nearby Veneto there are hospitals that are 2/3rds empty.
Projections of mass death requiring everyone to shelter-in-place are based on the belief that everywhere will "go Bergamo" simultaneously at once. That isn't happening, it's not even close to happening.
Go investigate and you can find stories of deserted hospitals all over the world right now. They've been cleared out in anticipation of an imminent surge that isn't appearing. That's why Germany and Switzerland can take in patients from neighbouring countries - not only are there no makeshift hospitals but hospitals need financial bailouts because they've having to pay so many staff who are basically idled, like many other businesses.
Clearly there's a huge mismatch between the global view and a small number of local hotspots, and our understanding of what's happening is heavily coloured by the press.