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this country had its first case 3 months ago and now we have 10 times more cases then where it started???

Not arguing in favor of any present statistics, but here is how it works.

On, say 1 March you have 1 case. A week later you have 10 cases, a week later 100 cases, a week later 1000 cases, a week later 10000 case, a week later 100,000 cases, a week later 1,000,000 case and a week later .... well we don't know because somewhere in there we and everyone else in the world started exercising various forms of social distancing [even the Swedes].

But that is what happens with exponential multiplication.

Try this at home. Fold a sheet of paper in half and then again and again. How many times before it is so thick you can't fold it any more.

Even Andrew Cuomo gets it about exponential growth - "we have beaten this back to where one person infects .9 other people" and we are coping. If one person invfects 1.1 other people this explodes out of control."

Once you get your head around all of that, then the reported numbers make sense. Are they right? Well, there is some evidence that there were random cases, and death earlier than we knew. There is evidence that we are not finding our counting all the cases.

We can fix that. With a few thousand random but accurate across the nation serology tests looking for antibodies we can get a pretty accurate estimate of just how far this spread. With some DNA studies on evolution we can get a good idea about how long it's been here and where it came from (e.g. China vs Italy, vs).

But the numbers are not nonsense.

Thanks for your post.

While we will never know exactly how many would have died if we had just sat on our hands and watched the virus spread, the measures that were taken by Trump were both rational and, IMHO, necessary.

But many if not most here at good old FR don’t agree with that view. It seems to me that they an implicit belief that the curve would have flattened naturally with negligible impact on the death rates.

Listen to Tucker Carlson. He believes that the lockdown was unnecessary and, apparently, that curve would flatten by magic. I am waiting for him to explain the mechanism for that flattening.

But it is time to move on, to end the lockdown and the Trump Plan is good as any. Let Montana go back to work but wait awhile on New York. The death count will rise as we do this but hopefully at much slower rate. I expect that the current estimate of 60,000 deaths will be surpassed as things get back to normal.