How could the US possibly beat these numbers? Do you imagine shutdowns more severe than Wuhan happening here?
All that said, the math is brutal and you're right about things not being immediately apparent in the statistics. There's a delay for symptoms, and then another for deaths.
Unless another country epicly fubars their response, the USA should maintain its #1 spot. All the more so if states don't encourage social distancing for another week.
More interesting to me is that we have a measure by which we can evaluate our leader's response. Deaths well north of 200K means he severely screwed up.
Of course we'll never convince his base of that should it come to pass.
And to be fair, if he keeps the number of deaths in the 100K range then he will have done a good job from the point at which he started taking action.
Everything in excess of that is a shocking mix of incompetence, hubris and malice - including refusing help to states whose governors aren't sufficiently deferential.