I'g grateful to @washingtonpost for publishing this but the 10x figure is not really the point of the article. The point is that because we are so behind on testing, we can't use testing the same way countries with more tests and fewer cases can. It's a nuanced point so pls read
And paradoxically, given the level of distress we are seeing in the health care system, it is good not bad that we have many more cases. That means that the horrible outcomes we are seeing (because they are getting tested) are the tip of a bigger iceberg of milder cases.
We can only hope the proportion of unobserved cases is large, because then we are closer to achieving herd immunity, and each bad outcome brings with it a larger number of mild outcomes that contribute to herd immunity. The math of epidemics is weird.
