William Frist, M.D., a nationally acclaimed heart and lung transplant surgeon and the former Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate saw it coming years ago.

http://www.terrellaftermath.com/

Back in 2005, Dr. Frist warned: A Storm for Which We Were Unprepared

Any number of unknown viruses for which at present there is neither immunization nor cure are at this moment cooking in Asia and Africa, where they arise in hotbeds of densely intermingled human and animal populations. We are in unexplored territory.

U.S. coronavirus numbers: So far, a less rough week  "Towards the end of last week, deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus in the U.S. were averaging around 1,900. The first two days of this week (April 12 and 13) have seen a decline. The U.S. reported 1,528 deaths from the virus on Sunday and 1,535 yesterday.
"The number of new U.S. cases also decreased. Last week the numbers came in at 30,000 to 34,000. On Sunday, there were 27,421 new reported cases. Yesterday, there were 26,641.
"At the end of yesterday, total reported deaths in the U.S. from the virus stood at 23,640. Even with the improved numbers we’ve seen, the total will probably exceed 30,000 by the end of the week. And with so many new reported cases in the past ten days, we can expect fairly large daily death counts for quite some time thereafter, unless the treatment of new patients has substantially improved (a possibility).
"Not long ago, Italy began to report a diminution of daily deaths and reported new cases. At that point, as I discussed here, the daily death count started coming in at about 75 percent of the previous average. It has lingered at that level for a while now, even as new reported cases have continued to decline (yesterday’s new case number was 3,153, half of what it was in late March).
"Dr. Birx, the administration’s point person in the fight against this pandemic, likes to say that we’re a week or two behind Italy in terms of “flattening the curve.” I don’t know whether this means that our trends, as we descend from the peak, will mirror Italy’s. However, I think the Italian experience (which is similar to Spain’s) is worth noting."

We Never Needed to Flatten the Curve  "The purported rationale for the shutdowns that have crushed our economy and devastated the lives of tens of millions of Americans is the need to “flatten the curve.” We have all seen diagrams like this one many times:"

"The theory behind curve-flattening is not that the virus will mysteriously disappear while we are all hunkered down, and we will emerge when it is safe to come out. That won’t happen. The point of curve-flattening is to prolong the epidemic, making it last longer than it otherwise would, as you can see in the curve-flattening diagrams. That way, more or less the same number will get sick and the same percentage will die, with one exception: our hospitals will not be overwhelmed by a crush of COVID-19 cases, and so ICU rooms and so on will be available for those who need them. That was the point of the shutdowns–to flatten the curve by stretching out the epidemic." . . .