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 # 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) # infections in the # is different enough that the country's experience should not be compared to either # or #