Sure - one would have to be omniscient in order to predict the spread of the outbreak: we'd have to know the actual numbers of every infected person in every city, town and village; the dynamics of propagation in every area, and the compliance of every man, woman, and child with the wide variety of federal, state, and local guidelines.
Barring that, all we have are the numbers which are readily available. Though incomplete and imperfect, a few sets of these numbers employ reasonably consistent reporting protocols - the official CDC numbers are in that category. They can give us a general overview of the trends of the virus at a national level. And there's a clear general downward trend in the rate of spread of the virus at the national scale even as the infection rages in areas like New York and New Orleans - so whereas those localized epidemics are driving the trailing indicator - the death rate, at the national scale our isolation and disinfection measures are dominating the leading indicator - the rate of increase in active cases.
So even as the horrific scale of hospitalizations and deaths is reaching a fever pitch in many of our urban areas - and will continue to escalate in the weeks ahead...we can also see that our voluntary isolation measures are slamming the brakes on the expansion rate of this outbreak, and if that trend continues then we could see the fruits of that success in the form of dropping hospitalizations and daily deaths by the latter half of this month.
We just have to make it through the next nightmarish 2-4 weeks; at that point we should be heading down the slope of the peak. It's too soon to know the angle of that slope, but it's possible that we'll be back into a manageable scale of hospitalizations sometime in May.
There aren't enough ventilators or hospital beds or medical staff to handle the the sheer scale of the ICU cases that we'll be seeing over the next few weeks though, because the US reacted far too late in the beginning of this when it would've made a huge difference. And we still haven't instituted the draconian federal lock-down that we needed to implement by March 1st. So by March 9th our fate was sealed - at that point it was too late to prevent a national calamity of historic proportions, and that's what we're only beginning to see right now.
It lowers the odds of getting infected. But I don't think it's nearly enough to fully protect people from transmission, because we've known for weeks that the virus can remain viable in microdroplets circulating in the air for up to three hours. Whether the viral load within a microdroplet that can circulate that long in the air is enough to start an infection remains unknown, but I wouldn't want to take any chances.
Not only are the people who get infected highly contagious for days before they detect symptoms - it seems that at least 25% of the people who become infected never experience any symptoms at all. But they're just as infectious as someone who's lying in a hospital bed with a raging fever.
So between the long incubation period (5.1-day mean average among a 2-14-day variation), the ease of transmission (inhaling a microscopic droplet from the air that most people produce just by speaking, and easy fomite transmission), and the 25+% of "covert carriers," this goddamn virus was perfectly suited to kick our asses all over the globe from day one. Any leader with a brain would've known this and acted accordingly when it would've mattered, but leaders with brains (and a sense of morality) are about as common as unicorns. So now it's entirely on us to stop this thing.
