How is the US 12 days behind? Where does that number come from? The first Italian case was a month after the first US case.

Iirc the first us case was isolated, what really matters is the first community spread. The 12 days comes from lining up the curves. Our current # of cases is where Italy was 12 days ago.

Population of Italy is 60m and the US is 327m.

Land size if Italy is 116,347 mi², land size of US is 3.797 million mi²

I don't think it's fair to make any assumptions from those infection numbers when the two countries are vastly different.

Interesting, but to truly track similar to Italy wouldn't we need higher numbers being we're a much larger populous? Just curious.

Each outbreak is regional, having the numbers normalised to the total country population doesn't really give interesting information. It is the medical system of that specific region that is at risk of saturation.

The US isn't doing anywhere near as much testing as Italy.