I never was very good with math

[BGBD]

13. It isn't expanding that quickly.

We aren't on an exponential curve that increases by an order of magnitude weekly. There just were and are way more cases than are acknowledged and as we expand testing we are going to find more and more.

We can assume that COVID-19 has been circulating here, largely unmitigated, for the past two months. Without testing almost all mild cases would have been mistaken for common colds while more severe cases could have been mistaken for flu, potentially include some deaths. Deaths by pneumonia in the US during flu season are usually attributed to flu even in the absence of a positive flu test.

Basically, our official numbers are much lower than the actual number of infections out there. We can take that as good news in that the fatality rate of the virus is probably going to end up much lower than the 2% that has been thrown out there. On the downside, there are probably going to be a lot of infections and there's a chance that we've waited too long to start social distancing. Once you get to around 1% of the total population infected, distancing isn't going to be all that effective anymore.