There is an incredible disparity between regions - countries in Europe and states in the US that doesn't allow cross comparison of data to form a universal model/prediction.
NY skews the US data. With New Jersey, the 2 states are more than half of all reported cases. The infection rate in NYC looks like nothing else, stateside. What would one expect when you stack >8 million people in a relative cracker box with a population that relies on public/common transportation, massive amounts of shared common space, and huge influx of non-NYCers everyday. That probably pushes the daily, real population solidly over 9 million, prior to 10 days ago. A city block there has more people than most towns in the midwest.
Northwest Indiana has ten or so hospital facilities across a few counties. Those three counties have 24 positive results (3/25). 2 of those counties have had drive-thru testing since last week. There are reportedly, less than a third of the 24 under hospital observation. Others are self quarantined. Now, in reality, there are probably more than 24 people carrying, but there are a whole lot of people I know self-quarantining at this point. Around half the counties in Indiana have less than 2 positive cases.
Illinois has nearly 2,000 cases, 19 deaths, the vast majority of cases/deaths are in the Chicago metro area (6+mil), which is substantially geographically, larger than NYC. The infection rate and pure number are no where near NYC. Nearly every county outside of the Chicago collar have less than 5 cases, with the vast majority reporting 0.
There is no universal model that applies across all states, let alone countries. The curve flattening to preserve hospital space is a much bigger issue in densely populated areas.