Your point was obvious, but if you meant to downplay point made by the person you were responding to, then you were wrong to do so. The exponential can indeed be extrapolated for many e-foldings, until the number of infected people is a significant fraction to the total population.
Proof: China's infection rate https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
If R0 is in the range of 2-3 the interventions need to reduce transmission by 75% to 85% to get R0 values down to 0.5. At that rate exponential decay starts and the math works the same in the other direction.
The China or South Korea data isn’t especially comforting when you look at the scale of interventions required to bend the curve.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-coronavirus-quarantin...
I'm not a huge fan of sarcasm, but I think zepolen was right to point out that blindly predicting exponential growth is ridiculous. The world is more complicated than some sophomore level differential equations would indicate.
> If you've got a real prediction, why don't you say it?
The doubling time of the number of infected people will continue to be about three days, until strenuous social distancing measures are implemented (or in the worst case, herd immunity is reached). The rate of newly detected cases will begin to bend downwards about 1-2 weeks after the introduction of such measures, due to the delay between infection and onset of symptoms.
> And you moved the goal posts from "deaths" to "infected".
The number of deaths is proportional to the number of people infected.
