Tom is a clerk, earning $10 an hour. He fills out a time sheet showing 8 hours per day, Monday through Friday, and turns it in to his boss at the end of the day Friday.
A week later, he receives the check for that period. He looks at it and realizes his boss has paid him for 40 regular hours, a total of $400 before taxes.
“Hey, boss! My check is wrong. You under paid me.”
“What? Let me see that.” His boss examines the check and statement. “Looks right to me 40 hours at ten bucks an hour.”
“No,” Tom objected. “I had 32 hours of overtime.” He waves the time sheet in his boss’s face. “See? 40 hours reported on Friday.”
“No, Tom; you worked 8 hours on Friday. Certainly not more hours than there are in a day.”
“But I reported them on Friday. So that’s when they should be counted.”
His boss sighs in exasperation. “Tell me again where you worked before here.”
“Johns Hopkins.”
Yeah, Johns Hopkins is like that; lumping all the reported ChinCOVID cases from different days — sometimes different months — together as if they all happened the day they were reported.
Johns Hopkins claimed 3,424 “new cases” and 37 deaths on 11/19, in Georgia.
Georgia on the other hand gives preliminary counts (preliminary, because it takes a while — sometimes months — for reports to come in) of 1 new case and 0 deaths on 11/19.
Interestingly, JH’s cases number doesn’t even match the Georgia Date of Report number: 2,375 (and one of those occurred July 6). Somehow, JH found an extra 689 that Georgia doesn’t know about.
Perhaps I should change the name to Tom Hopkins.
But “Tom’s” numbers are what all the media reports to claim a huge surge in “new cases”
(Yes, I know I’ve been over this quite a bit before. But a few folks seem to have difficulty grasping why the difference between date of onset and date of report matters. I thought the little parable would help the short bus set get the idea.)
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