My previous post on this topic:

https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=913666&posts=83#M8131038

neukm had some good points in that thread and it kindof seems so far like one of them in particular was correct. He said that 20 days was too long between infection and death. He said 14 days would be better. If that is true that would make my estimates I made in that thread 6 days premature. And honestly it seems like he may be somewhat correct. President Trump started encouraging social distancing in a big way on March 13th. I would imagine for a couple of days after that we were actually worse at social distancing because the whole country was panic buying in preparation for staying home. So maybe the true effects of him starting to push social distancing didn't really start until the 16th or 17th. 2 weeks after that would put us at today and over the last two days our mortality rate has gone down by 10 to 14% vs what it was before so it's very possible that the last 14 days our transmission rate has been much lower than it was, maybe as low as 10 to 15%. We will know more as we observe the rate at which deaths increase over the next couple of days.

Anyway, when you move the curve I described to the right by 6 days and you change the transmission rate to say 15% from the 16th on, things look a lot better than what I forecast.

Based upon those updates I'm guessing:

1. Right now we have enough people infected that within 2 weeks we will have at least 27,000 COVID-19 deaths

2. Right now depending on true mortality (NOT case mortality, true mortality) we have somewhere between 3.3 million people to the vast majority of the country infected or recovered from being infected

#2 is the frustrating thing about this whole deal. We should have a huge priority on finding out what true mortality is. If 1 out of every 10,000 people dies then we likely have 270,000,000 people infected and/or recovered right now and things are about to get a lot better.

If 1 out of every 125 people will die then we likely only have 3 or 4 million people infected right now and we have a LONG ways to go before herd immunity can start taking over the job of social distancing.

Unfortunately without testing every single person in a statistically significant random group of the population and testing them not only for whether they are infected but whether they have been infected and then recovered, it's impossible to know where we are in our path to beating this thing and how serious we should be about the social distancing going forward.

I still believe deaths is the only somewhat accurate number we have. I still believe the rate at which deaths increases is a reflection of how quickly the infection was spreading 2 to 3 weeks ago. The problem is, without the true mortality number we have no idea if we are towards the tail end of the exponential growth curve or if we're towards the beginning of it.