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Anyone who repeatedly keeps referencing "cases" as a valid measure of CV incidence is either uninformed or spreading disinformation. On a more tightly managed site (like T_D.win), it's ok to be (initially) wrong; you would be corrected and downvoted. However if you persisted, you would then be assumed to be a troll and your account banned.

As I hope you know, "cases" is used to drive a particularly negative portrayal of Trump and his administration's efforts. It's why J Rubin at Wapo wrote her editorial using that basis to claim the US now has the highest number of infected in the world. We know she works as a propagandist, so it's her job to intentionally confuse certain issues by spreading disinformation.

But for some reason FR apparently allows the unidentified sabotage to continue unabated. It's run as a commercial operation, so it most likely needs the controversy, page views and comment volume to remain viable. I just thought it should be more widely recognized by users who might not know otherwise what is occurring.

In case anyone is interested in why/how small polling samples can produce very accurate, broad projections, you might want to review some of the core principles covered in this article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/howcan-a-poll-of-only-100/

The tl;dr version is: if "cases" weren't dependent on self selection, determination & reporting (of people feeling ill), but rather were a completely random sampling of individuals selected across the country, within regions, within demographic groups, etc, then it *could* be considered a valid statistical reference for those particular queries.

But it's not; imagine a political polling operation that questioned everyone going to a series of Trump rallies. Each day, as they continued to ask people who they were voting fore, the tally number of course would keep rising. Would the proglibs become alarmed? (By this process, not for other obvious reasons.) Why? The questions are being asked of self identified Trump supporters. Duh.

IOW, it isn't an accurate measure of the entire electorate. So too CV cases - the absolute number of 'respondents' is being tallied by different organizations to produce some kind of ratio to infected, resolved, fatal, etc. that fits their particular designed narrative.

I get why they're doing it - they're the self ID'd enemy; it's what they're supposed to do. But to have an ostensibly conservative web site continue to allow this completely - embarrassingly - process error post after post, day after day, really begins to raise questions.