doing the math: 232,000 by Easter

Savannah is officially under orders to shelter in place until midnight of April 8th.
The emergency state was put into effect as of midnight on Tuesday, March 24th.
Thank you, Mayor Van Johnson.
Unfortunately, that order may not have occurred in time, nor be long enough.
I've been watching the numbers, for Italy in particular.
It's been staggering to watch the number of cases and number of deaths increase daily.
I needed something that could crystallize the information for me.
So, as I do for a hurricane watch, I decided to do for this pandemic.

I decided a series of photos might tell the tale
of the way the coronavirus has overwhelmed that
country's healthcare system, as a forewarning of
what to expect here.
As shown here for the February 18 data, Italy
doesn't even show up as having any cases.

This data was collected for March 4th.
That's just over two weeks later.
By that time, Italy had jumped to having
more than 3700 infected people.

A mere eight days later, that number had
more than quadrupled, as Italy posted over
16,000 cases.
Let that sink in a moment.
In just over three weeks,
Italy had gone from ZERO cases
to 16,000 cases.

By March 20, i.e., another week later,
those numbers of infected people had
effectively doubled.
Italy had more than 34,000 people
confirmed as having the virus.
This was after Italy had imposed
a "shelter in place" for its populace.

Where does the USA fit in this evolution?
Well, I decided to look again at the data
for March 4, as that is when the States first
made its appearance on this graph.
The numbers were so slight as to be almost
of no consequence, standing at less than
200 cases for the entire country.

Again, looking at a time span two weeks later,
as done for Italy, the number of confirmed cases
in the USA stood at more than 24,000.
At first glance, that seemed an abnormal increase,
compared to the data seen for Italy.
However, when put into perspective, that number
was to be expected.
After all, the population of the USA is roughly
5.5 times greater than that of Italy -
that is, 328 million to 60 million.
So, if Italy had an increase of 3700 from zero,
then the increase from 200 to 24,500 for the USA
is in accordance, corrected for population.
That means the United States has a huge increase coming.

This chart bears that out.
Remember, after the next week -
the third week after cases first
appeared in Italy - their number
of infected had quadrupled.
If the US is following suit, then this week's end should reflect a quadrupling of the number of confirmed cases seen on March 20.
That means the value would be expected to be around 98,000.
This was yesterday's data.

Today's data indicates some validity to my hypothesis of the relationship of population and time elapsed to number of COV-19 cases.
At the time of this press release, the US had more than 91,000 confirmed cases and will no doubt hit, or exceed, 98,000 by day's end.
As the news stated, the USA now has the dubious honor of leading the rest of the world, including China, in number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
If the pattern seen for Italy again holds true for us, the States will continue to outpace all other countries
By April 4, Palm Sunday, the number of cases here, in my country, should double.
That means there will be roughly 116,000 cases in the USA in one more week.
By Easter Sunday, that should double again, to 232,00 or more.
Honestly, I believe the values will be higher.
I hope I'm not right.
I'd rather be wrong on this matter.
I'd prefer to be wrong.
I guess time will tell.