1. States mishandled their testing data

Officials in Texas, Virginia and Vermont admitted last spring they’d been combining the figures for COVID-19 infection tests and COVID-19 antibody tests, leading to statistics that misled the public into believing those states were doing more testing for active cases than they actually were. Though some accused officials of fudging their numbers for political advantage, the mistake was widely accepted as honest, but inconvenient, one born out of ignorance toward which types of data are useful to inform decisions about public health and the economy.