I do not trust China's numbers, I think the real numbers for China are way higher, but it is difficult to know.
Regarding Italy, what is happening now is that the growth has become linear and it is not exponential any more (each day the number of newly reported cases and deaths is more or less the same, no more doubling every 2 -4 days), which may not seem much but actually it is a great improvement, next week I expect the number of daily new cases and deaths to start decreasing and that will be the sign that we are approaching the plateau. It will still take few weeks for the plateau yet.
go have a look on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic) and see the progression for any country to get an Idea of what exponential and linear increase looks like...
Agreed on China, not using there data, pointless.
Problem is, if it's the lockdowns, which drag it down the releasing will mean, increasing and more lockdowns
You get Swine Flu not deadly went around the entire planet in 2months right ??
We'll see soon ish, next few weeks, who is right or wrong.
I'm betting on me

