this is incredibly annoying b/c by mid march we almost certainly had a million cases

the case count is not a representation of reality but a complicated confluence of case surges & testing capacity https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1286494655161536513

Michigan is a great example of how early case counts didn't accurately measure the situation.

If you look at cases only, you'd think that Iowa and Illinois had much worse infections that Michigan did /2

But that clearly is not the case.

What happened was that we had no testing in the early weeks of this crisis so, if we're only looking at cases, we complete missed the fact that Michigan got hit much harder than any midwest state

(all this is from my post trying to look at every state in the US with context) https://polimath.substack.com/p/your-states-covid-numbers-in-context