My state is cooking the books ... again.
The governor's office issues a CV-19 data sheet every day, and I've been printing them out and logging the numbers on a spreadsheet since March. The state doesn't report recoveries, so I also check the Johns Hopkins web site every day to get numbers on recoveries for my state. Until October 1, the state's number for active cases agreed with the Johns Hopkins number for active cases. As of October 1, a large discrepancy appeared between those two numbers, and there was no explanation.
As of today (which reported yesterday's numbers), things got even murkier. I just downloaded the new report for "today" (which is actually for data as of 8:30 yesterday evening). The number of new cases reported is 1157. BUT ...
There's a footnote. For some reason, they decided to add in 530 new "cases" and 26,321 tests that were conducted from August through October (and the first few days of November) that were for the antigen test rather than the nasal swab (molecular) test. As you probably know, the antigen test is not considered to show infection -- it only indicates probably past exposure to the virus. But the State is now including positive antigen tests as "probable" cases.
And the State is still not reporting recoveries. Johns Hopkins shows recoveries for the state, and they must be getting numbers from somewhere, but the State isn't making the numbers public. Furthermore, the Johns Hopkins number on recoveries doesn't change daily. Typically, it changes every Thursday. But it hasn't changed recently -- it has been stuck at 9,800 for fifteen days.
Bottom line -- we now have even LESS idea of what's really going on than we did before. And what we were being told before was far from being an accurate picture.
[Edit to add] I just realized that the antigen test is not the same as the antibody test. The antigen test has been approved as a rapid result test since August -- but it is not supposed to be used for positive diagnosis. It's supposed to be used to identify people who need a nasal swab test for a definite diagnosis.