Somewhat related to the OP's post, what really drives me crazy is focusing on cases since beginning of time. California has 174k cases in this case. What really should be looked at is week over week increases and number of new cases, and only of active cases, old cases shouldn't really be included but newspapers love sensationalism. In addition states are combining antibody test positives(person had covid, recovered) with active positive tests(nose swabs, person is infected with covid) [1]. Basically testing and presenting digestible results have been a disaster. In addition finding decent dashboards for this info is surprisingly hard. Local ones like santa clara counties one are good [2], but step up the state and national level and its hit or miss.
[1] - https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/this-is-...
[2] - https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx