Also announced a USPS package sorting worker in Seattle has been infected. Feels like there is a massive shoe about to drop in US akin to South Korea / Italy spread.
Yes, but it will take time because the acceleration is proportional to the amount present until it reaches a carrying capacity and burns itself out, or it slows in deceleration because of large quarantines / isolation orders. The problems are many:
1. The fed/state/county/local officials are placing prevention of panic ahead of telling the truth. NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said yesterday, with De Blasio next to him, that it's "only 2x more dangerous than the flu," when it's 20x-50x deadlier than influenza (because each flu strain differs).
2. Like a third-world country, the CDC is hiding information about tests performed and negative results.
3. The CDC is actively thwarting doctors from ordering SARS-cov-2 tests because of overly-restrictive PUI criteria that don't allow discretion of the doctor, so it's a virtual certainty people with COVID-19 are being told that they don't have it because some pinhead bureaucrat said so and they're going around in public infecting people before they come down with what they may assume is a bad flu.
4. COVID-19 takes a number of days to manifest itself, and it appears that people are contagious before they have symptoms, so they spread it unwittingly to potentially many others because it's so infectious.
5. Mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 won't be tested and reported, giving a false sense of the situation.
6. People who died before the SARS-cov-2 test was available haven't all been tested. There were several bodies that tested positive today in Washington state adding to the death count, but not every morgue is going to do this. Plus, it's possible many such bodies were released for burial and will never be tested.
7. It takes weeks to a month for recognition phase (the current situation in the US as of writing) to give way to initiation and acceleration phase of pandemic. I figure, based on the current trends, the US is about 2 weeks ± 4 days away from acceleration.[a, b] But, by that time, it's too late for many people because they were already infected by numerous infected people who weren't showing symptoms.
8. The poor and working class rarely have sick days and they can't afford to miss work, so they'll work anyhow. The prevalence of "F everyone, I have to take care of myself first" is what happens when people aren't paid living wages and guaranteed sick days off. And so, more people will be infected and more people will die because of greed.
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Then, once a country begins pandemic acceleration, it may last about a month ± 2 weeks before the number of infected drops enough that it's no longer pervasive. [a]
a. Based on China's Wuhan epidemic curve as a rough, approximate model.
b. Five phases of pan/epidemics: investigation, recognition, initiation, acceleration, deceleration
Keep an eye on Seattle to see what’s coming for other American cities!