Looking over the statistics Trump put out yesterday I have some issues. The same I had when Birx put out numbers a month ago.
"Nationwide, more than 850 counties, or nearly 30 percent of our country, have reported no new cases in the last seven days."
This is true. Here we can see that number is actually 905.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b... This is good, however its nice to know over half had zero cases to begin with.
But even more important is how useful is it to compare by number of states? Isn't percentage of population the actual concern since the virus is not isolated to a region or state?
For instance of the 850 counties with zero new cases, when all combined they make up about 5.8% of the total US population.
So we have 30% of the "Country" that reports no new cases. and also using the same counties 5.8% of the US population has no new cases.
This doesn't mean that things aren't improving. It just means, to me, that the math can be presented to make things look a certain way. I prefer to make weekly charts and overlay them by state so the trends can be seen in direct comparison.
This is new-case reporting of living humans.