The Atlantic

We Don’t Know How Many People Have Recovered From COVID-19

Recovery has no standard definition, and some states, including California and Florida, do not report such data at all.
Source: Scott Olson / Getty

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

In November, The Covid Tracking Project stopped reporting recovery figures for the United States as a whole, and yesterday we also removed many, though not all, of the state-level “recovered” values from our website. We want, above all, to provide accurate and meaningful information. Unfortunately, when it comes to recovery data at both the national and state levels, accurate and meaningful information is hard to come by.

There are several reasons to remove these data from our website. First, several states and territories, including large states like California and Florida, don’t report any kind of recovery data, and it doesn’t make sense to report a national total that excludes so much of the country.  A second

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