The other thing is the incubation period is around 5 days. So really the numbers are at least 5 days behind.
I'm by no means an expert, but to me the problem seems to be lack of proactive social distancing; and lack of proactive testing of everyone with symptoms.
Current guidelines seems statistically sound, it's just that we have little mitigation for the few that do slip through.
"The researchers found very high levels of virus emitted from the throat of patients from the earliest point in their illness —when people are generally still going about their daily routines"
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-...
The stories abound of a hospital visit with a magical bill that appears months later with some unpaid sum that's in the 4 digits. Everyone knows someone who this happened to - I happened to know a couple who received a 5-digit bill for a baby who died many many months later. Now, as a rational person you're not going to go to an ER willy nilly, and sometimes an ER is what you get pointed to by smaller medical centers.
The U.S. medical model doesn't work - for the group. It works - for the individual. I had superb eye surgery recently from a top world center and it was fully paid. But the viruses don't care if one of us can afford care, and the other can't, because the virus views us as a singular organism, and now we're all at risk. Which is exactly how the health system should begin viewing us.
I'm particularly miffed about this because it seems to have spread to our shores and convinced a bunch of people that the reason the UK has lower numbers than Italy is because they're not testing people, to the point they're literally unable to believe that Italy has only tested twice as many patients for the coronavirus as the UK.