Logically speaking the most likely reason is Trump sealing the Border with China almost immediately, even tho the start dates were close to one another, far fewer people got into the US with this than other countries, who just in the past few days sealed their borders.

I’m very angry that we are reacting so severely that we are crushing many people’s lives over concern for a hypothetical case for which we have absolutely no corroborating date to support the official outlook. Nobody at this stage knows exactly what percentage of the population has had or does have this, so we don’t even know the infection rate or the fatality rate, anywhere, due to small testing samples.

There is one exception to this, and that is the Diamond Princess, which is the only closed system in which we know the exact population, the number infected, and the number of fatalities. In that closed environment, with petrie dish conditions ideal to disease transfer, 18% of the population on the boat got sick, about 700, and there were 7 deaths, generating a case fatality rate of 1%, and a population mortality rate of .002. That’s with a demographic spread that is significantly older and more infirm than the overall US demographic. All of the fatalities were over 65 years old.

IMO, the most practical way to deal with this is to have the gravely at risk population stay home, receive no visitors, including family members, until there is a vaccine or successful therapeutic treatment, and the rest of the population go back to work. Governors and mayors, by their draconian shutting down of entire industries in the name of “flattening the curve
“ through social distancing are putting millions of workers who live paycheck to paycheck in a position of financial disaster and risking not just a recession, but a depression. We flat out don’t know this is worse than the flu, which kills hundreds daily and 15,000-70000 in any given year, with tens of millions infected. We don’t shut down the economy for the flu, and we shouldn’t shut it down for Wuhan virus.

We’ve come to this pass due to the media scare tactics, combined with the at risk elderlies putting extreme pressure on politicians, who than cover their butts by edicts ceasing various forms of commerce such as restaurants, bars, conventions, trade shows , city lockdowns that greatly interfere with our personal freedoms as well as costing jobs for people who live paycheck to paycheck, which is at least 40 % of Americans.

So I’m hoping that the so called professional will find a way to get us back close to normal except for the most fatally at risk ASAP,else our economy will go into deep recession.

A couple of promising developments from Dictator Trump:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-admin-to-allow-all-medical-personnel-to-practice-across-state-lines-to-stem-spread-of-pandemic/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/03/the-fda-strikes-again.php

POSTED ON MARCH 18, 2020 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN CORONAVIRUS
THE FDA STRIKES AGAIN
The WSJ briefly reports that President Trump has “considered issuing an executive order greatly expanding the use of investigational drugs against the new coronavirus, but was met with objections from Food and Drug Administration scientists who warned it could pose unneeded risks to patients[.]”
The Journal report bears on our push to raise awareness of possible therapies and get some action on them. Our friend Brian Sullivan comments:

(see a couple of posts over the last few days with sensible messages from Sullivan)

Let’s hope The Dictator overrules The Bureaucrats.

South Korea has tested more than 270,000 people, which amounts to more than 5200 tests per million inhabitants—more than any other country except tiny Bahrain, according to the Worldometer website. The United States has so far carried out 74 tests per 1 million inhabitants, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.

–“Coronavirus cases have dropped sharply in South Korea. What’s the secret to its success?”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/coronavirus-cases-have-dropped-sharply-south-korea-whats-secret-its-success

The US isn’t looking too cool either with 1267 new cases. Meanwhile China, which has 8043 active cases, only reports 13 new cases.

I’m not understanding how these numbers work, assuming they are roughly accurate.

So what? You want to improve matters, segregate the old as much as you can manage.

2. It’s not practical to completely separate older people. Families spread over several generations and include all ages. We do not have the resources to take all old and vulnerable people out of their families and communities.

3. Shutting down public venues and inducing people to avoid contact does slow the rate of new cases. And the rate = the number of serious cases our hospitals must handle at once.Too many serious cases simultaneously causes bad outcomes by swamping health care facilities.

So: we can’t prevent Grandpa from getting the virus, but It may now take a few more weeks for his teenage grandchild to get infected and bring it home – and that may save him.

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.

–John P.A. Ioannidis
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

I’m annoyed how little, beyond raw data, is nailed down about this disease. I remain mystified at how different the stories told by the data are in different countries.

I wonder why COVID hasn’t burned through US homeless encampments. Wouldn’t we hear about that?

cases = 48.397e^0.2893(days) which predicts about 6500 cases. And the final number isn’t updated on the site until midnight. Social distancing, with an active period of 14 days, I would suspect take two weeks to show an effect.