Data discrepancy? – HEALTHLYNKED COVID-19 Tracker Review

Today is 24 October 2020. I'm on USA CDT, where it's 8:53 pm. These remarks cover three mobile-phone apps that provide data on COVID-19: Two publicly-issued sites are one from the World Health Organization ("the WHO") and one from the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("the CDC"). I assume that the third, "COVID-19 Tracker," is from a private developer. For some weeks I've noticed discrepancies in the numbers reported by these three apps. For example, today's case number in the USA as reported by the CDC as of 8:53 pm CDT is 8,469,976. Meantime, COVID-19 Tracker's USA case number at the same date and time is 8,195,318--a count last seen, per the CDC, sometime between 21 and 22 October. COVID-19 Tracker attributes its data (including, I assume, its USA data) to WHO. WHO/COVID-19Tracker's data thus seem to be lagging behind those of the CDC. The reason for this inconsistency among the data issued by the CDC, the WHO, and the COVID-19 Tracker is unknown to me. I hope that these organizations' time schedules and methods of data aggregation simply differ in the ordinary course of doing business. If so, that should come out in the statistical wash of the professional articles already crossing the journal editors' desks. Meantime, it might be reassuring if these three groups would publish a joint statement that accounts for the differences among them. However, I seem to recall that President Trump, in one of his characteristic fits of pique, announced that he was upset with the WHO's data and therefore was going to sever the ties between the United States and the WHO. Maybe Trump also nudged the CDC to take its time transmitting its data updates to the WHO. Cutting off the WHO could also have led Trump to instruct his flunkie-in-chief responsible for paying the membership fees for such global organizations to skip the check for WHO--which is a heroic coalition that has fought virtually every worldwide disease--smallpox, malaria, poliomyelitis, leprosy, dengue fever, HIV/AIDS, schistosomiasis, and a host of other horrific diseases that most of the developed world has long forgot or never known--thanks to the WHO. There's little doubt that Trump has dismally failed in his duty (or indeed, his opportunity) to mobilize the nation's medical resources against COVID-19. I hope that the data inconsistencies described above are not signs of the Trump administration's sloppiness and indifference. Of such signs we have enough, already. We, the People, will likely end up paying the national public-health bills that Trump has decided to leave unpaid. We will pay them in diverse currencies: of alliances failed, of lives lost, of survivors' ongoing illness and grief, of the other, yet-unforeseen agonies brought upon us by this brand-new disease and by its inevitable successors. I omit from this review the Johns Hopkins and Massachusetts General Hospital apps on the pandemic, because they seem to aggregate their own data in their own perhaps idiosyncratic ways. I hope that the county public health administrators across the country are tracking, and contributing to, the county-level data published by Johns Hopkins. And I wish that Kansas--on the state level--would grow up and publish its own public-health data, on its own app/site, seven days a week instead of just on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The state has the data--you can find them on the CDC app. Is Kansas Public Health afraid of losing face? KSSHRINK
Review by 9robins on HEALTHLYNKED COVID-19 Tracker.