@lnxw48a1 The article controls for where in the spread curve the US and Italy are. At the same point, after hitting the same threshold, Italy was having it much worse.
But as for whether the US or Europe is the current "epicenter" of the pandemic, the whole argument is silly. Every country goes into exponential growth until they enforce a nationwide lockdown. Some parts of the US are just now starting their lockdowns, as are some countries in Europe.
I don't think the article controls very well for anything. In particular, in both China and Italy, the overwhelming majority of reported infections have happened in a single region of the country, so "19 days past the 100th case" of #2019-nCoV means something quite different when most of the cases are in a single subregion of a country than when they are fairly well spread out. It is much easier for a given number of cases to overwhelm the medical capacity of a single region than it is to overwhelm the entire country. (And overwhelming an area's medical capacity, according to "flatten the curve", makes all the difference.)
If anything, Durden makes a case he did not argue: that the pattern of (known) #COVID-19 infections in the #USA is different enough that the country's experience should not be compared to either #China or #Italy.