Five days later it doesn't look far off: 3,178 deaths in the USA according to worldometer.

The only things that will bend the curve downward are:

1. The virus begins to exhaust the available fuel (i.e., something approaching 60-70% of the population gets sick), or

2. Strict social distancing measures are implemented.

Option 1 means that ~200 million Americans contract the virus, ~20 million need hospitalization, and ~2 million die. At that level of hospitalization, though, the healthcare system will collapse, and the death rate (not only for coronavirus patients) may well go up significantly.

That's the logistic curve you'll get if you leave things to run their course.

Sounds like a friend who in early 2018 told me that if Ethereum kept going up at even half the rate it had been for the next 3 years he would be retired!

I sadly had to pop his bubble by pointing out that value represented more than the sum of money in the entire world.

You have to ask yourself what drives exponential growth, and what eventually breaks the exponential.

What drives exponential growth in an epidemic is the fact that each person infects some number of other people, on average. The more people are sick, the more people get infected each day. Growth is proportional to size, so you've got an exponential curve.

What stops exponential growth in an epidemic is when so many people are immune that the average sick person isn't able to infect more than one other person. At that point, the epidemic dies off exponentially.

You only reach the exponential decrease phase once a significant fraction of the population has immunity. That only happens once they've gotten sick and recovered.

Based on the transmissibility of COVID-19, it's expected to eventually infect 60% of the world population, unless a vaccine is developed before it does.

That's a good catch, but I assumed he was just being sloppy in his terminology.