Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we KNOW it's controlled? Asymptomatic people are not, as a rule, tested, so actual infection rates could be massive.
No country except Iceland or South Korea knows how many are infected, everyone else's numbers are horribly wrong. But death numbers and hospitalization numbers don't lie. Sure, different countries are counting deaths differently, making it hard to compare them to each other, but the trajectories don't lie. And if you look at growth trajectories, no country is experiencing uncontrolled exponential growth at this point…
They most certainly do lie. I know people who work in a particular police department, and they have been exercising a policy of not testing people they find dead. Situations like somebody found dead at home in bed, perhaps some blood that looks like it’s been coughed onto a pillow. Whoever’s in charge of policy wants the numbers lower, so they don’t do a test, and the death is recorded as something non-Covid related. Conversely you have NY who recently decided to declare all cases of death where Covid could have been a plausible cause as Covid-19 deaths. Not only are death statistics reliant on methodology and testing policies, but they are equally as open to manipulation by political actors as the infection statistics are.
This isn’t unique to this situation either. These kinds of statistics are manipulated all the time in lots of different situations. For example you could never smoke a cigarette in your life, but if you manage to die of lung cancer, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ll be recorded in smoking statistics. Then you have things that are even more nebulous, like trying to figure out how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident. Lots of different people will try to answer that one for you, and the gap between the lower estimates and the higher estimates is enormous.