while this Medium post "#Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" is going viral please bear in mind that it was not written by an expert, so pls stop RTing. The message is correct: social distancing works and should be applied asap, but the way it's written is questionable.
#COVID19
#COVID19
I don't have time to go much into detail because I'm working on this currently, but one major flaw of this post is that it assumes test results come in way later than they actually do. So the author estimates that there are way more unknown infecteds than there probably are.
Fact is that the duration until a positive test results in China (the curve he says is for Hubei is actually for all of China) decreased from 20d to 5d over the course of 1 to 2 weeks. In Europe this duration is likely much shorter (preparation due to efforts in China). 
The author says in a very alarming way that the number of unknown infecteds in France is likely in the tens of thousands or higher, but this is based on the long-duration-of-test curve in China and not applicable to Europe (I can't say anything about the US because I don't know)
While there certainly are more unknown infected, it's probably not as high as he suggests. again he makes the mistake of referring to the curve of China as the curve of Hubei/Wuhan.
He doesnt mention that contact tracing is applied effectively in many countries which leads to situations where individuals that are likely infected are already in quarantine days before they show up in the curves.Again, this is for countries in Europe, I don't know about the US.
I really do not have time to go through the post to see what else is not factual, but there's a lot of guessing and polemics in there. Due to the sheer amount of epidemiologists you can retweet on the matter I would ask you to do that instead of RTing this medium post.
Finally, again, he is right on this: the earlier social distancing /mitigation measures are implemented the better. If you can, please stay at home. Thank you.
