Commenter Education Realist supplied interesting numbers on the cumulative path of deaths in Italy and the U.S. Let’s work with those.
Call the date at which there were 12 cumulative deaths in each country Day 0. The next number for Italy is 17, meaning that there were 5 deaths on Day 1. For the U.S. it is 15, meaning that we had 3 deaths on Day 1. So Italy is +2 on Day 1. Going forward, we have the following numbers for Italy minus the U.S.
0, 5, 8, 7, 19, 25, 33, 43
This is some combination of faster spread in Italy (starting from the same base in terms of total deaths) plus a breakdown in the ability to deliver care in Italy. Assuming it is mostly the latter, you want to take strong social-distancing measures sooner rather than later.
You can see all the data here
Another guy put together city wide cases in US, which is badly needed.
Those aren’t exactly city wide. They are for an entire county, which makes it hard to compare. Kings County, Washington and New York County, New York are basically Seattle and Manhattan (but not the outer boroughs). The Colorado counties are sparsely populated but include ski resorts where there was a lot of spread. Snohomish is in the Seattle metropolitan area but a good deal of the cases are from that one unfortunate nursing home. New Rochelle is “over-represented” in Westchester’s statistics.
As the first link makes clear, there are a lot of cases not in the spreadsheet at the second link (click on USA in the first table). I keep turning their graphs to log scale and getting a straight line, which suggests that the rate of increase is staying pretty steady. At some point, that would produce an intolerable state, so social distancing is definitely the way to go for a while.
The increase also includes the echoes of global infection carried with passengers flying home. The Canadian numbers have been increasing substantial but the rough estimate I heard yesterday is that 90% of the cases are travel/close-contact while 10% is what I’ll call “undetermined”. Panic sets in when it is assumed to be “community transmission”.
The bad news for Americans is that the about 30% of the Canadian travel cases are from the U.S. and Contact Tracing seems to stop at nation-state borders so we don’t know if these cases represent Community transmission or One-Hop-Travel cases.