Originally Posted by
gregf83
You don't appear to understand what 'exponential' growth is. California, along with the rest of the world, is experiencing exponential growth. Attempts are being made with measures like lockdown to lower the growth rate. If you look at the chart below it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that with no action California will, in a relatively short time, reach similar case levels as those in Europe. Italy was late in enforcing lockdown measures, California is hoping to avoid the problems Italy had.
The graph below has the number of cased plotted on a logarithmic axis where an exponential relation will show as a straight line with the slope directly related to the growth rate.
That graph is on cases, skewed as noted by others on increased testing. Also totally ignoring the populations. 10^4 cases does not mean so much until you also divide by the population. And 10K cases does not have real meaning until you know the cost of that in deaths or care.
Putting Italy cases and USA cases on the same graph is misleading.
The rates are based on those numbers divided by 60,000,000 population denominator for Italy, and the 330,000,000 for the USA.
As I acknowledged, actions may be a big reason why our rates are lower. The thing I don't like so much about the case graphs is they don't tell us so much. They may help predict hospital loads, but as hospitals will do mostly ICU - quarantine, in many cases the sick should just stay home. The other thing is the case:death ratio is very different based on age / location. Germany 18,756 cases, 53 deaths .3%. So besides overlaying vastly different populations with cases, we don't have a good handle on what those cases mean.