Looking at the daily death tallies for Italy and the United States, in some ways it appears we are following their trend, just lagging two weeks behind:

Lombardy, Italy’s hardest hit region (by far): 9,206 square miles and roughly 10,000,000 people, 25,515 cases and 3,095 deaths (as of 3/22/2020)

New York City Metro area, United States “epicenter”:  13,318 square miles, 21,000,000 people, 17,000 cases and 150 deaths (as of 3/22/2020)

Note: cases for New York listed above are for the entire state, not just the metro area, so in actuality, the numbers would be a little less, but I don’t have the time to hunt them down.

The New York Metro area is denser than Italy’s Lombardy region.  In order for us to be following in Italy’s footsteps, just 2 weeks behind, New York Metro area needs roughly 6000 more deaths, given the population is double and the current total for the entire state is 150 deaths.  To mirror Italy, the New York Metro area needs to average 450 deaths a day for the next two weeks, but since the death counts are like a set of stairs, it means tomorrow there should be around 50 deaths reported in the area, the daily total will have to go up a little everyday and on April 5th over 1,500 people will die.  Hopefully that is not the case and it does not look to me like it will be.

Currently there are around 450 people in the ICU.  I will have to watch how that number changes over the next few days, but given the size of New York that doesn’t seem like the system would be stressing.

In addition, the death-to-case rate in the United States is 5 times lower than Italy’s was two weeks ago and ours is trending down, not up.

Our death rate was skewed by the disaster at the nursing home in Washington, so everyone expected it to go down from that point, but the fact that we have crossed under South Korea, does not make me think ours will suddenly “pop”.

Also worth noting is that the death-to-case rate in New York is currently .009, lower than our national average.