So, here is an actual reasoned and backed discussion of what is going on.
Tomas Pueyo
Italy and Israel and SK and Japan and China are not overreacting.
France, UK, USA are in trouble.
Unless someone is saturation testing, you should assume 1 death means 800 infected. Washington has 24 deaths, so probably close to 20,000 people are infected today; on the other hand, 20 of them are in one building, so maybe only 3200. Error bars are large.
There are 190 confirmed cases, but that is just because they aren't saturation testing. But 190 is not a realistic number with zero controls, no saturation testing, and 4 distinct clusters of deaths.
It takes ~20 days for someone to die of this. In ~20 days, each sick person infects ~8 people uncontrolled. The death rate is ~1%. So for each person who dies, there where about 100 people infected who didn't die 20 days later, and those 100 people infected 800 more people.
There are large error bars on this. But this matches what happened in Italy and elsewhere when they started saturation testing; the number of cases sky rocketed "out of nowhere". Without saturation testing, you get only the people who are really sick ~3 weeks into their illness, by which time each represents ~40 people in the community who have the virus and are either still developing symptoms, or didn't get really sick.
Again, there are large error bars; 40 could really be 15-400. 800 could really be 200-2000. But it gives you an order of magnitude.
Deaths are easier to count, as people get really sick before they die, and they seek medical help, and there are enough tests to test the people who are really sick with what is probably Covid.
NJ/NY has 1 death, so probably ~800 cases (wide error bars). Bay area has ~600 using different math (no deaths yet). Paris area has 20,000-100,000 (many deaths). UK has 5,000 based off deaths.
If they introduced mitigating measures today, their peak number of detected cases and deaths per day would happen in 3 weeks. If they wait a week, the peak doubles. If the peak passes their health care capabilities (as it has in Italy), death rate will climb.
Areas that mitigated early enough to stay under health care capacity have a death rate of 0.9%. Areas that don't have a death rate of 4%+. Currently nobody in the USA is mitigating enough.