With an open mind, I do see your point about the daily case numbers. I’d ask you to consider this: that ‘screen scraping method’ is pejorative.

I’d argue that it’s more about official DPH reporting — publicly. Sure there’s a lag, but it is valid to track newly reported cases.

I agree it’s valid for many important uses. I go to the same websites you do, and like looking at the statistics.

It is not valid for the New York Times to represent that their graphs are from the Georgia Department of Public Health when they are absolutely not.

They do both have benefits and weaknesses. For the Attribution method, it is more accurate for the specific date. But the downside is that one would have to wait two weeks to get data that can be trusted.

I don’t think that’s a hard limit. I think with the attribution method the data two weeks ago are 100% solid, the data one week ago might be 95% solid, the data three days ago might be 50% solid, and such. And I think the public health officials processing this data are in a better position to determine how solid the data is on any given day than a desk jockey in New York looking at scraper data.

And the more important point, though, is that “confirmed cases” is a universally garbage number given our current testing rates anyway. The only good data we have to go on is confirmed deaths, and that data has a tremendous lag. Georgia is in a position that now, even with that tremendous lag, we know our actual case rate peaked in late March.

Unfortunately, going forward this is going to mean that if we get a tremendous spike we won’t be able to really verify how big the spike is until weeks after it happens.

So the best we can do is take a balanced approach to looking at the data we have.