it appears the curve absolutely is because Italy and Iran (the furthest along) are following it almost to the day. Spain and France appear to be there as well. Flu and other outbreaks follow similar bell curves, even the severe one from several years ago. The tail is very aggressively down on these outbreaks typically. I feel we made so many assumptions early on (from terrible sources like the WHO) that we lost track of the best tool in our tool chest, personal data observation. I think this whole thing is an indictment on people trusting computer models too explicitly. While I'm no epidemiologist, I'm a computer scientist and we work on machine learning models to predict risk in financing. If I see a model so outside the ordinary I immediately try to tear it apart because most likely it is wrong. That means questioning every assumption, every input into the model.

I have stayed with my same predictions for a long time even while all the dire ones keep bringing down their numbers every week. Again, this disease is real, and it is very serious. However, I want to know the enemy we are facing without exaggeration or hyperbole, because you face threats based on their true impact, not just "what ifs". Anyway, I believe the data points to the R0 being very high with lots of asymptomatic. We will get to a decent amount of immunity that will slow the spread (how long term I don't know) faster than feared. Here is a random blogger I found that has been very accurate in predicting Italy and Netherlands (he is Dutch himself) and it matches very close to what I am observing.