May 1st prediction:
US deaths: lognormal(11.4, 0.5) mode: 69k -- this is roughly equivalent, per capita, to what Italy is at currently (March 30th). Therefore it assumes the current growth will slow considerably. 15k is not even on the radar. I expect we will hit 3000 today, and 15k around April 7th.
US confirmed cases: lognormal(15, 0.7) mode: 2 million. This is more uncertain because it largely depends on how fast we ramp up testing.
Update: it is the evening of April 7th and the latest data from plague.com has the US death count at 12,846. It looks like we'll hit 15,000 on the 9th probably, so I was a tad pessimistic. People have been talking about how new infections are slowing down and they think everything will peak in mid-April, but I don't see much reason to believe it. The trend continues much the way it was before.
I'm curious about people's current predictions of future:
As a schelling point, let's use May 1 (5/01/2020) as the prediction date, and worldometer as the data source.
Predictions should be in the form of a simple distribution such as a normal or lognormal.
My current predictions:
US cases: lognormal(13.0, 0.3) mode: 404k
US deaths: lognormal(10.0, 0.6) mode: 15.3k