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This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Blindly assuming exponential growth will actually hold is downright excuse for panicing thinking. Exponentials inevitably

• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  "Infects literally everyone" is 7 billion people. If it infects 0.1% of that, it's already going to be extreme. Obvious limiting factor would be local saturation. Problem is, we're shuffling population faster than ever before. No, I see no reason to not expect the virus to ride the exponent into millions of cases. I guess we'll see if I was right in less than two weeks. EDIT: On top of that - arguably, it's not the virus that's most dangerous right now; it's the healthcare system overload and the disruption to the supply chains (and the economy in general) it caused. Not going to take bets on that, but I feel somewhat positive that these secondary effects will lead to more deaths than the COVID-19 itself.
• greenhatman 7y ago
  That's exactly it. Exponential growth can only be cut short if proper containment measures are followed. If not, infection rates will look like the S curve of popular technology adoption rates, where it only tapers off when nearly everyone has been infected.