I am not willing to say that it’s probable, but it’s definitely possible.

-Laelth

reduce the growth factor, but yeah, the numbers will continue to soar by the end of april, if not sooner, our hospitals will be absolutely crushed.

until tests have run out or can't be produced to the level they need, it will be worse

SHUT THE COUNTRY DOWN!

1288^1.26 = 8288 so pretty close.

Week 1 (March 18): 8288
Week 2 (March 25): 86,557
Week 3 (April 2): 1,664,416
Week 4 (April 9): 69,938,240
Week 5 (April 16): 7,524,216,337

(I would guess) it's because without that, exponential growth becomes not only possible but likely.

That's ... uh ... 75,000,000 dead bodies (in the world) one month from now, at a 1% mortality rate, assuming it spreads like it has the last 1 week in the USA.

If anyone wanted to know

Which closely resembles an exponential curve at first then becomes concave down and flattens out. Suppose you tell a new joke to five people. They love it and tell their friends. In a couple days, you tell the joke again to five new people and two of them say, “I heard that one already” and so forth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

Or the food learns how to fight back.

The flat top of that sigmoid could be pretty damn high if we don't fight back effectively - like China has.

Assumes a 1.8 (80% transmission rate) factor.

Not an April Fool’s Day joke.

My exponential curve (the kind you're doing) using daily- rather than weekly - data since Feb 27 puts it at roughly 17 million on April 16.

The curve y=30.548 x e^(.2648 x days since 2/27) fits with a r^2 of .9921.

That said it's not at the exploding up stage - at which it will be more realistic for predictions.

And - complicting predictions - is that we still aren't testing. So the daily increase in casees is limited not by the number of cases out there, but by the number of tests run.

And, as noted above, at some point it will tip back down because we're either all infected, or all dead.

First, we are taking action in most of the country at an earlier stage than Lombardy. Not all regions. Parts of Washington, New York, California and other areas will get real bad, real fast.

But here we gain some luck that much of our nation is much less dense than Italy or China. Even without Social Distancing most places are just not packed in. Because I work in Central Florida I may have a higher risk than many places in the US. But even here many people are taking serious and have for while.

Not saying it’s not going to be real bad. But not as bad as your curve indicates. My opinion anyway.

What you're seeing there is testing catching up with what is possible when there's a functioning government, as opposed to Trump's clusterfuck of denial that reigned earlier. That doesn't mean they'll be able to carry on increasing testing that much, or that it will carry on finding the same proportion of positives.