It’s more precise to say you don’t know whether you have 1000 deaths yet, as you are not testing even dead people at the same rate as elsewhere. Washington state got “lucky” by having a pretty obvious cluster that could not be brushed under the carpet, but there are likely hundreds of other pneumonia-related deaths going on right now who might well be undiagnosed covid19.
The estimate of how many deaths might be undiagnosed might be speculation, but it has already happened in Seattle that COVID deaths were misattributed to seasonal flu. In both cases, the death and symptoms will look identical the difference being in the underlying virus causing the issues.
"In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days."
The US has failed to do any significant level of testing given its population, so it's understandable why many people are not confident in the official figures, especially when it becomes apparent infections have been running unchecked for weeks before testing started.
>In both cases, the death and symptoms will look identical the difference being in the underlying virus causing the issues.
As stated before that is absolutely false which is why those cases were caught. Will data be imperfect, yes, but that doesn't mean we should start throwing around Chinese propaganda.
Probably not true, as we don't have 1000 deaths yet. Though, give it two weeks, and we'll easily have caught up (to where Europe is today).