This is absolutely not apple's to apple's. We have 7 times the number of people in the US as Italy. Also, as I said yesterday, our confirmed numbers would explode as we got our testing up to speed. That doesn't mean we should panic and cry that the sky is falling. Before this last week or so we tested very few people. We will see it explode more still as we test even higher numbers soon. This want necessarily mean out infection rates exploded overnight as most of these people were most likely already infected. We just didn't know it.
Not to mention ten days ago Italy lost 168 people. So far today the US is at 42.