Remember that not all countries are identical. Italy has the second oldest population on Earth, behind Japan. So COVID-19 was always going to be especially bad there, even before they screwed around early and didn't jump on things in time. The more old people in your community, or people with compromised respiratory systems, the worse it'll be.
You cannot simply say "this happened to Country A, therefore the same thing will happen to Country B," even if their governmental responses are identical.
It happened in Country A, B and C.
We know what happened in 1918. We know what pandemics and epidemics look like.
1.33^20 is 300x. Every 10 days it gets 17x worse. This is happening
everywhere we have numbers for except China, SK, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, etc -- the places that have instituted serious measures.
It doesn't matter if you have 3x the elderly population or 1/3 the elderly population of another country, when that factor of 10 is blown away by 8 days of exponential growth.
Exponential growth is hard to understand. 20 day delay on control vs result is hard to understand.
We have both going on here.
20 days after you start changing how it spreads before you can change how many people die or need ICU care.
In 20 days, this gets 50 to 300x bigger.
So when your ICU beds are less than 2% stressed by this (maybe as little as 0.3% stressed), that is when you have to panic, or things get very bad.
What more, 80% of deaths can be prevented with ICU care. So for every death, you need 5 ICU beds, and those beds are in use about 4 weeks to save a life. So for every death per day, you need 5 * 20 = 100 ICU beds treating people. Run out of ICU beds, and anyone who needs one dies instead.
It has been 100 years since the USA was hit with a serious epidemic. Current technology and economic strength is enough to defeat this one, unlike the last one. So you either fight it with your entire economy and people, or you surrender and accept a 1% to 10% death rate.
Every country that has stopped or slowed this has fought it with the entire country's might. Those curves going down where not "oh, the epidemic ran its course", they where the result of massive social distancing and contract tracing and treatment.
This isn't "omg the sky is falling". This is "how much would you pay to save the lives of 3 to 30 million Americans". Surrender is an option. Iran seems to be doing it (and lying about it; the data they publish is pretty transparently faked.)
Surrender, Total War or Pray. Pick. Talk to your politicians; local, regional, national.
All 3 are options. I vote for War.
