Just for kicks, I took the data from the following website:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
for the period from March 1 - March 14th and ran a trendline to see how close an exponential formula matched up with the recent data. The resulting formula was:
Infections = 72.847 exp(0.2865 x n), where n = the number of days 3/1/20
with an rsq = 0.9989, so a pretty tight match.
Plug in n=30 for the projected number of infections by March 31 - 393,707 cases. So, yeah, we better hope that our social distancing efforts (and any other factors that we may luck into) make a difference, or we're pretty much fucked pretty quickly.
If you want to see the impact of efforts to curb the spread of the disease, the website offers a logarithmic graph option for the total cases - no impact = a straight line on the log graphs, effective efforts cause the log graph to bend downward. The US data trend is starting to bend down over the last day or two, so hopefully this demonstrates the impact of the recent shutdowns of large gatherings / businesses in the U.S.
** Obviously, this is an extremely simplistic analysis, and there are a lot of factors that come into play in modeling this stuff out, but it's eye-opening. I wish people understood even the basic math involved.