I didn't realize, when you go to worldometers.info and go down to the chart showing all the countrie

[captain queeg]

If you click on US, graphs just for the US pop up. If you have even a little mathematical background it’ll shock and scare you. We’re almost to 1000 cases now, will certainly cross that threshold by tomorrow then into the thousands by the weekend. Maybe 10s of thousands. Certainly will be next week.

[Ms. Toad]

1. That's recent -

or at least the US is a recent arrival to it. (You'll notice the countries with fewer cases don't have that option)

[captain queeg]

2. They probably aren't getting there statistics from the federal government

Have to compile state’s statistics

[Ms. Toad]

3. My guess is that they are using many sources.

If you look at the places that are tracking case-by-case analysis they often cite reports of press conferences. So yes, it takes time.

[Igel]

4. Some graphs are more useful than others.

The "total cases," not so useful. Scare-bait.

"New cases" is important. Watch the shape of the curve. I'd like them to factor out Washington State--their trajectory is different from every place else's in the US, but that's a bit of effort.

"Daily Deaths" is important, for the same reason. Again, I'd like WA taken out because it skews the numbers, at least in the short run. When outliers dominate the data and they're clearly outliers, then you look for the actual signal in the midst of the noise.

Except the death rate graph to go asymptotic to something like 1% when the dust settles. Right now, with a note saying how non-random and skewed the sample is it's more scare-bait than anything.