Why do people – including journalists – rely on http://worldometers.info  for data on the pandemic?

It has big errors. It has been like this for weeks. And it's not getting better.

I especially don't understand why people rely on Worldometers because there are much better alternatives.

E.g. the @ECDC_EU does very thorough work every single day https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/geographical-distribution-2019-ncov-cases

These are researchers who know what they are doing and who care to get the data right.

@google's top search result for 'mortality rate covid-19' is this Worldometer page http://worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate
Worldometer is just copy-pasting whatever crap they find.
It'd be funny if it wasn't serious.

Metrics are dangerously mislabeled.

At the very top ( https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus ) they claim that there there are 1,621,348 Coronavirus Cases.

The big problem with the pandemic is that we don't know the number of cases.

We know *confirmed cases*. The total is surely much higher.

Below that is this table that lists the world's country.

Worldometer claims that Spain did 355,000 tests. No source provided.

That test count for Spain is an unverified number that was released *20 days ago*.

https://www.elindependiente.com/vida-sana/2020/03/21/sanidad-asegura-ahora-que-espana-ya-ha-realizado-mas-pruebas-que-corea-del-sur-y-nadie-se-explica-los-datos/

This is the top of their 'Age' page (
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/)

Their definition claims that this table reports the infection fatality rate (IFR) by age.

If it was indeed the IFR it would be terrible what this table reports here.
But they are wrong and it is actually the CFR.

If you want to check that I'm not making this up, these numbers are reported in this paper in Table 1.
https://cdn.onb.it/2020/03/COVID-19.pdf.pdf

These numbers are clearly not what worldometer claims they are.