[shaggy]

Please if you're going to create stuff like this provide some context and answer questions like "What does this actually mean?". Without those things, this is just another scary looking title and graph that will make people more panicky than they already are. Given the ramp up in testing seen in my state, the large jump up to the cases in the graph isn't surprising. We know that the US has a far higher population than Italy and that testing rates in the US have been very low. Large spikes in confirmed cases are obviously going to happen as the testing ramps up. That's when we can start drawing conclusions and make better decisions. When we have a more clear picture of how widespread this is and what that actually means. What's the R0 and what's the mortality rate? On the other hand, if we accept that there are far more infected people right now than we know, the logical conclusion is that the mortality rate is low, otherwise there'd be dead people everywhere.

[fabian2k]

The huge issue with the numbers is that they always lag behind the actual situation right now. There is a delay of around 5 days until symptoms show, and something on top of that until you get tested and until the test is processed. And the deaths lag even further behind, it takes very roughly something like 3-4 week to die as far as I've read.

The deaths of today are the people that were infected 4 weeks ago, 4 week is an eternity on an exponential curve like this.