@Syag, of course you need to take lots of factors into account. daily trends are easy – just take a 7-day average of the time series. If you want to read faster signal, you would need to match day-of-the-week ore careful. Not asking about protests is a good question, I agree with you. I am not sure whether it affects the question – what is an early prediction of magefa in the community. Misrepresentation is an even bigger question. I think nursing homes are the biggest examples. I followed several examples and overall statistics – where overall mortality measured later on uncovered that a number of nursing homes were hiding numbers. I am not sure we disagree much here.
What I have a problem with – an example of the person in this thread who suggests to sick people not to get tested. To spite the Mayor, I presume. So, possibly increasing chances that someone sick will not get treated on time or will infect someone else. Unfortunately, there is a taste of this in one of the public letters I saw recently that says – “to facilitate an accurate assessment of the infection spread in our communities and to prevent further surge, it is important for people in high infection areas to get tested now for COVID-19.” I think this is a deniable call to present a better picture of the community (while presumably wasting tests and public resources). As daf yomi explains – we can (and should?) judge people by kiso, koso, vekaaso.