I would not say Italy is on the other side of the curve. They just had their second day where new cases reported were less than the previous day about a week and a half after ordering all restaurants to be shut down in their quarantine. Social distancing and quarantines do work. Hopefully they can keep the quarantine long enough to sort everything out and contain the spread, but there is no "herd immunity." If they lift the quarantine too soon the virus will take right off again.


NYC is most definitely getting worse, as is the rest of the US. The population has to be quarantined until everyone with the virus can be identified and the infected populations can be properly contained. If we take the quarantines seriously, stay home as much as possible, prevent the spread, and shrink the number of infected people and places to something that is known and manageable, this can all be over in a month or two. If we half-ass the quarantine though we'll likely end up with both a highly deadly pandemic that affects just about everybody on top of another GDP-pounding quarantine while we're still hurting from this quarantine.