After watching the updates over the past day, it became clear that the CDC was only updating once per day, while Wikipedia was updating constantly as new information came in. When there was a CDC update, that data would get reflected in Wikipedia very quickly. So overall for responsiveness, Wikipedia was a better source. So I changed the data source for the US numbers on the Swine Flu Dashboard to be Wikipedia, just as with my world numbers. (Links to the specific Wikipedia data sources on the Swine Flu Dashboard itself.)
Also, using the magic of wiki history, I went back and backfilled my data to include at least one data point per six hour interval going back to April 30th (UTC). Before that in the wiki history it seems like the standard for what was a “confirmed” case was not yet clear, and so numbers had been reported differently and were higher.
Anyway, now the four times a day update for the US numbers will actually catch changes more than once a day, and the historical numbers are just as nicely filled out as the new numbers.
Oh, and the curves are actually starting to look a bit exponential now, whereas they had previously been looking more linear.
Woo!
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