Andy Jackson explains it better than me.
“Shouldn’t the size of the country’s population be taken into account?”
No! That is the point of exponential increases. The important number is the number of newly infected / day divided by the number of presently infected. If it doubles every three days, it doesn’t matter where you start. Soon most of your population will have been infected. The difference between infecting all of Italy and all of the US is about 1/2 of a week.
By plotting the numbers on a log graph you can determine the alpha for each country and as Travis’s plot shows it is pretty much the same country to country.
Now, if you were to show plots for Taiwan or Singapore or China you would see very different patterns because they have broken the chain of multiplication through effective public health measures.”Knowing that Italy, as an example, has 4 times the rate of infection as we do here in this country”
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You obviously have no scientific training, because you would realize that when you scale effects to the population, there are only two relevant numbers: In calculus it is written as 1/N dN/dt - the fractional increase in cases day over day, and the other is percent of population infected.
The former is about .13 for the US and about .05 for Italy - in other words the “RATE” [rate scientifically means change of a quantity per unit time] of infection in the US is almost 3 times as high as Italy. The second is the fraction of the population infected which is .16% for Italy and .04% for the US. Now why is this latter relevant - because saturation effects will not happen until a significant fraction of the population is infected. Even if both numbers are off by a factor of 100 it would barely effect the rate of spread of the disease.
That Italy has a higher fraction of population infected is because the epidemic has been going in Italy longer than the US - a fact we all know. With cases increasing in the US as they are, it is only a matter of time before we reach the same level of penetration as Italy.
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