You know what's not being reported on? I'm going through the charts on https://www.worldometers.info and I notice something. There's different tabs for "cases" and "active cases", and you can drill down into some individual countries (like the USA), and you can drill down into some individual States (like California).

So I'm going through it today, and one of the columns is total deaths. So for the purposes of this thread, Closed Cases = Deaths + Recoveries, and while there isn't a column for recoveries specifically, you can infer a couple of things from the data that is there.

First, the data sucks. Each State and in some cases, each county health department is responsible for reporting their own cases and deaths, but it seems not every place is making good efforts to track recoveries. If you drill into California and check San Francisco, and it's not limited to just San Francisco, you can see the "Active Cases" over in about the sixth column is only Cases - Deaths instead of Cases - (Deaths + Recoveries). Not all 58 Counties are like this, but you also have outliers like Humboldt where apparently 52 of 54 total cases are recoveries because there aren't any reported deaths and there's only 2 reported active cases.

It isn't limited to just individual counties in California. If you go back up a level to the USA and look at various States, you can see that New York is making some effort to track recoveries because at a glance, Active Cases does not equal Cases - Deaths, it's actually quite a bit lower than Cases - Deaths, which is good. But if you look below New York at New Jersey which has had the second highest number of cases, it would seem like every closed case has been a death, because Active Cases = Cases - Deaths, same probably with San Francisco County in California.

So when I last looked a few hours ago, the United States had about 964K Active Cases. This is probably both an overcount and an undercount. It's certainly an undercount because we obviously have no idea how many people are actively carrying it right now. But it's also an overcount because of the verified cases, recoveries are being underreported.

This bloody chart in the NYTimes is annoying. It is seemingly trying to apply some corrective measures to people's expectations about how much the curve is actually flattening in the country, that it is not equally flattened, and that reporting is fine. It's leaving out half the bloody story which is: recoveries. If the goal is to lead and not mislead with this piece, then by not attempting to address the discrepancy in reported cases and active cases, and how many closed cases are closed because of recoveries and not because of deaths, it will leave people with a sense that maybe the country is in worse straits than we think, or at least different pockets.

To be blunt, nobody knows. They don't know, the Administration doesn't know, apparently half the bloody Governors don't have a clue about a big part of the situation in their own States in addition to almost every other part of the situation, and if you assume that in terms of closed verified cases, recoveries outnumber deaths 4:1, then New Jersey should probably be subtracting somewhere around 30K Active Cases (assuming there have been 4x as many recoveries as their reported 8K deaths).

A lot of people are dying or dead, but what about the other side of this coin? How many are recovering, and why don't we know? Is it really the case that in New Jersey, not a single person has reportedly recovered and all the closed cases are actually deaths? The number that's getting trotted out by the media in terms of cases is 1.2M (implicitly, verified cases rather than actual cases). But we don't currently have 1M verified active cases, we may not even have 900K (yet) but the best available data I can find doesn't even reflect that.