Trust me, I get it. But then we look at places like China where we have no idea if they’re even reporting true numbers and compare our social policies to them.
Hospitalizations and deaths are really the only numbers that matter when it comes to concerns about overwhelming the healthcare system the problem is those are lagging indicators of the spread of the infection.
There is a lot of uncertainty right now in the numbers. I never trusted China, then I started trusting them on the back of the WHO. Was that smart? I have no idea.
I don't think there is a lot of benefit in comparing China to Italy to the USA. The quarantines are all totally different.
We know from basic logic that after 2 weeks, quarantine measures will have an impact. Whatever the R0 value is will fall when people aren't in close connection with each other. We don't need any numbers to realize that.
Also, China's quarantine in Hubei province was EXTREMELY tight. Italy's seems tight too, but they can still get out to the grocery store. The United States has differing levels of social distancing. These will work, but how much? Who really knows.
Italy is a bit confusing/perplexing. We have their numbers, but we already suspect their number of cases are significantly wrong. I mean their death rate is well over 10% and that seems extraordinarily high. So how "off" are they? Are their "reported" cases tracking along with their "actual" cases?
I think it's clear that it took 2 weeks for Italy to start seeing a lessening of their rate of growth and almost 3 weeks for them to see a lessening of their number of deaths. Those numbers will likely hold throughout the world, just due to the nature of this virus.
But to me, the USA is it's own animal due to many reasons. We know the rate of change will go down soon, but by how much? That's just impossible to predict, imo, and will vary from state to state.