Excel help

Have a fairly simple request, i have a row of cells with dates, i tried using the countif function to tell me how many fit into a certain date but i have to put in the date every time, i want to use the today() to count how many dates are < today's date

=COUNTIF(Q2:Q599,"<Q606")

Q606=Today()

It gives me a 0 

what am i doing wrong?