This ^...Another way to spot check the “100000 cases” estimate without knowing the Wuhan numbers is to consider that that would imply roughly 1e5 / (2^4) = 6250 cases 3 weeks ago (the typical delay between infection and death; assuming 6 day doubling time), which corresponds to 31-125 deaths by today for a case fatality rate in the interval of [0.005, 0.02]. That would be for Ohio alone. As of March 13, the US CDC is only reporting 36 deaths for the country as a whole (source; though reported as 47 deaths here) and Ohio is currently reporting 0 deaths (source). Not to say that this is a definitive argument against there being 100000 cases in Ohio, but it does suggest that this estimate wasn’t based on current understanding of the virus and its spread.
This ^...Another way to spot check the “100000 cases” estimate without knowing the Wuhan numbers is to consider that that would imply roughly 1e5 / (2^4) = 6250 cases 3 weeks ago (the typical delay between infection and death; assuming 6 day doubling time), which corresponds to 31-125 deaths by today for a case fatality rate in the interval of [0.005, 0.02]. That would be for Ohio alone. As of March 13, the US CDC is only reporting 36 deaths for the country as a whole (source; though reported as 47 deaths here) and Ohio is currently reporting 0 deaths (source). Not to say that this is a definitive argument against there being 100000 cases in Ohio, but it does suggest that this estimate wasn’t based on current understanding of the virus and its spread.
Update: On March 13 Trevor Bedford also tweeted a rough estimate of 10K-40K cases nationally.