Fair enough, they're dumb for WA because WA uses a dumb public metric. We have pretty decent daily case reporting, so it's actually accurate on that map. My region is 61 on Gmaps and 62 on the governmental dashboard. Other than that the map is just Johns Hopkins and NYT data repackaged, and since nobody does this shit any better than mediocre, it's unfortunately the best international comparison we got. Which is different from what you might need to inform yourself, but is what the original question here was.
Here's my point: Google is scraping the easiest data and calling it final. You're arguing that my source is dumb - it's not, they report the 7-day, too, which Google also gets wrong. I know they're wrong for where I'm at because I care a lot and I know that JH and the NYT don't agree with UW don't agree with WHO don't agree with FT and if Google is using "today data" for Belgium and "May data" for parts of the US then Google's map is worse than useless. Mediocre times mediocre is mediocre squared, not doubly mediocre.
Yeah that's the truly frustrating thing. I don't think there is one. I probably wouldn't care so much if I wasn't dealing with my county, my state and UW all dealing with the same data (at some level) and all reporting different shit. I lean into FT from time to time, but that's probably more to do with the fact that they were the first ones to put international data together in a legible fashion, and they call out underreported deaths more. I check NYT for the same reason - their visualizations are better. I don't think their data is necessarily good but I don't think anyone's is. The disunity around COVID is one of the most discouraging things I've ever seen. I watched an interview with Sanjay Gupta last night on Colbert. He pointed out that accounting for population, COVID in the US is exactly as fatal, at exactly the same speed, as the 1918 pandemic. It's like we've learned NOTHING.
NYT had one of those mini docs yesterday where they were like, "You know what's fucked up? The fact that all the places where they've been able to control covid they're basically following the protocols that were developed in the USA by the CDC and partners." So, yeah, we learned how to lead the horse to water all right. Getting him to drink has been a heavier lift, to put it mildly.
I firmly believe that Trump would be sailing to re-election at a 90% approval if, in the middle of the Democratic debates, he'd said "fuck all that we got a crisis y'all have to do what I say to save lives" and then proceeded to dictate a semi-coherent response. He could even be looting the shit out of the process, steering massive amounts of largess and payola to his cronies, nationalizing the Proud Boys as "coronavirus response militia" or some shit and stomp on minorities because their infection rate is so high. He could be exactly the goose-stepping, venal nazi he is, only he'd be getting away with it, if he'd actually just gotten out of the way, let the medical establishment take care of things and then taken credit for any successes. Intelligence literally came to him and said "here's a one-month head start on the issue that will define your presidency, how do you want to take advantage of it" and he said "I don't." If he hadn't kicked Steve Bannon to the curb years ago we'd be looking at like a fifth Trump term.