Consider a Venn Diagam with “asymptomatic”, mild, serious, dead, and recovered. While they are represented in one two dimensional image they are spread out over time. As the virus moves through the environment all these groups will fall on parallel curves separated by the average # of days one spends in each phase of the illness. So we know nothing about asymptomatic, a little more about mild, much better for “in hospital” and dead is just about a certainty. So death is the most solid number you have and you do “project” (or “model” is your word) forward in time to anticipate where you will be tomorrow or the next day. Sure an asteroid could destroy the earth and your prediction goes to hell but on the whole it’s “best information”. Projection the slope of our curve to Italy’s it appears by the end o f next week we will have just shy of 5,000 deaths which is what I estimated when Antoninius asked me to estimate days ago.
“As of Saturday evening, the U.S. had conducted more than 182,000 tests total, yielding more than 23,000 confirmed positive results, according to the COVID Tracking Project. As of a week ago, the number of tests conducted was just over 20,000....
...New York City is now in dire straits, with more than 7,500 confirmed cases in the city alone as of late Friday, according to the city’s Department of Health.”
How much of the growth of cases has been due to testing? And roughly 30% of all cases are in New York City. Hmmmmm...