The numbers are going to be changing for a very long time. It takes time for them to review files and test samples, many places are overwhelmed and we will not get their numbers for quite some time. Even if they take samples from everyone who died ( which they have not been) they still take time to review the files. Even worse, we have states such as Florida, who have been withholding the information all together. Most areas do not have access to testing, and like I showed earlier, we have cases where they are withholding testing locations from the public all together, and other counties refusing to release their COVID information because they don't want to " alarm people". It is a mess because we do not have a national standard. In addition, some places are counting at home deaths, some are not. SOme are requiring an actual test, the problem with that however, is that due to lack of testing available, many areas are not being able to test at all, let alone people who are already deceased.In New York specifically, it absolutely hit the vulnerable like a truck on the first wave, because the state panicked about running out of space and told the hospitals they had to send recovering covid patients back to nursing homes, and the patently obvious played out exactly as you'd suspect.
The numbers lately have gotten a tad questionable. Twice now my state has added in big spikes of deaths and said "oh, we had recorded things incorrectly in the past, here's an update", and on one occasion my county had negative 5 deaths recorded. They keep broadening what they are counting, and plopping the additions onto the end, and it screws up the trends. Even if the numbers they end up at are correct in total, it implies dumb things. If, for example, you had 5 days where the numbers go 3,2,3,2,1, it looks rather consistent. Then they go "oh, we missed 4", and correct the record to go 3,2,3,2,5, now it looks like flat to increasing. When the actual real numbers would have been 5,4,3,2,1. Like, multiple waves in different geographies over a slow spread is part of it, but even within small communities, the reporting is all sorts of screwed up.
And I'm afraid they're walking into a stupid trap. The US has like 7500 deaths a day by default. The majority of those happen in hospitals or nursing homes. Hospitals and nursing homes are all infected with coronavirus right now. Most places are counting everyone who dies with a positive test + any unknown with possible covid symptoms. That's never gonna stop. Meanwhile, we're testing more and more, the number of positives goes up proportionally, and some places are determining reopening based on a number without controlling for testing rate. The decision should be based off of healthcare availability. And I'm pretty confident history will look back at these current death counts as slightly exaggerated compared to the reporting methods of other nations.
You have this backwards, History will look back and show this to be severely under reported.
For some reason the forum errored in the middle of my post and it is continued below: