re: Here’s some evidence that certain reporters want more testing so that things look worse

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Yes. Yesterday the case positivity rate for California was about 8 times that of New York. California is really big, I suspect a few places with California are driving the an outsized number of cases. I'm disinclined to believe that the disease has run its course in NY because the data suggests only 25% of of the population has had the disease which is not enough to confer herd immunity. I am open to the possibility that there other factors driving differentiating in these outcomes.

What I feel comfortable saying is that S. Korea and California have about the same population. California will have more people die of COVID by Wednesday as S. Korea has had since this whole thing began. Can you explain why that is?

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That's backwards and fails to account for whether New York having already gone through its first wave is accountable for New York's current condition. Using this logic, Sweden's lockdown is more effective than California's even though Sweden is not under lockdown.

ETA: My reference to Farr's Law is not to herd immunity. We can debate the proper threshold for population-level immunity, but under Farr's Law, why does a new virus follow a bell curve pattern? Because the number of susceptible persons lowers as the virus makes its way through a population. Those persons have gone from susceptible to infected to recovered (or dead). Accordingly, the higher prevalence in a population, the harder the virus must work to keep its R0 up. New York's prevalence is significantly higher than California's, so if you assume an equivalent lockdown effect, then it would make sense for California to still have a higher infection rate, correct?