As for COVID data, it would be foolish to claim that the data we have is perfect. After all, we had a seemingly official policy of “if we don’t do tests more, we won’t have more cases” for the first month of the spread in the US. And without a doubt, there are people with stuff to gain by artificially inflating the numbers (incendiary media, etc) and artificially suppressing them (governors, etc). But, I think it’s also difficult to form a coherent claim that the data available is, in aggregate, completely bogus. If you slap an error bar of even 20% on the case numbers, I don’t think my ultimate interpretation of that would not change very much, but YMMV