COVID statistics can be very very difficult to interpret correctly, especially at the beginning when data was scarce.

For instance, most people agree it is best to exclude totally random testing sites from COVID numbers because even though the false positive rate is very low, at the beginning so was the incidence of COVID which means most of the positive tests would be false positive.

Including them or improperly dealing with that data would be considered base rate fallacy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

This is just one statistical phenomenon that has to be dealt with. It’s complicated and sometimes messy but it absolutely requires top minds