Here we go again...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...s-about-coronavirus-deaths-being-exaggerated/Birx and Fauci reject Fox News-promoted theory that coronavirus deaths are inflated
From the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, President Trump’s allies in the media have downplayed the threat. And as the death toll climbs, some of them — particularly on Fox News — are launching into a new argument: that deaths caused by the novel coronavirus might be inflated.
But the evidence and logic they offer are faulty. There are plenty of reasons to believe that the coronavirus death toll is actually being significantly undercounted, in fact, rather than overcounted. And the lead medical experts on Trump’s coronavirus task force on Wednesday night rejected the theory.
Tuesday night on Fox News, Tucker Carlson and analyst Brit Hume argued that the death toll may be exaggerated because people who are dying of other causes but have the coronavirus are being classified as coronavirus deaths.
Carlson cited weekly data on pneumonia deaths from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describing the drop in deaths as suspicious. He suggested that some people who are actually dying of pneumonia might incorrectly be logged as dying of the disease caused by the coronavirus, covid-19.
“For the last few weeks, that [pneumonia] number has come in far lower than at the same moment in previous years. How could that be?” Carlson asked. “Well, it seems entirely possible that doctors are classifying conventional pneumonia deaths as covid-19 deaths. That would mean this epidemic is being credited for thousands of deaths that would have occurred if the virus never appeared here.”
Charts using this CDC data have been circulating on social media, too, in service of the same argument. The actual data, though, doesn’t bear it out.
The most recent CDC data shows that the number of pneumonia deaths are lower these past few weeks than they have been during a similar period in previous years. The numbers have been between 3,200 and 3,500 per week since the coronavirus arrived in the United States in January. (The most recent week shows 2,930, but with 84 percent of expected deaths reported, meaning that number should rise.) Generally in this period, the numbers are between 3,500 and 4,500.
If you look closely, you’ll notice the data is old. The last week for which we have any data is the week that ended March 21. Why is that March 21 date important? By that point, the United States had logged just 385 deaths from the coronavirus.
There’s no way “thousands” of pneumonia deaths were being wrongly classified as deaths from the coronavirus because there weren’t even 1,000 coronavirus deaths logged, period.
Hume has been a proponent of a similar argument, suggesting that people who are dying of other conditions who also happen to have the coronavirus are all being classified wrongly as coronavirus deaths. On Carlson’s show, he pointed to a quote from Deborah Birx at Tuesday’s briefing.
Birx, who serves on the White House’s coronavirus task force, said: “If someone dies with covid-19, we are counting that as a covid-19 death.”
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This argument also appeared Wednesday afternoon on Fox, via host Harris Faulkner. She played Birx’s comment and asked, “How many of those people had other health risks at play, though, and maybe it wasn’t in fact covid-19 that caused their death?” A Fox News medical contributor responded by saying, “I don’t think it’s going to be a significant difference.”
Add another doctor who has now rejected this theory: Birx. She was asked about it at Wednesday’s briefing and referenced the point above about how the coronavirus exacerbates existing conditions.
“Those individuals will have an underlying condition, but that underlying condition did not cause their acute death when it’s related to a covid infection,” Birx said. “In fact, it’s the opposite.”
The other lead medical expert on the task force, Anthony S. Fauci, also made a point to weigh in, warning against such “conspiracy theories.”
“You will always have conspiracy theories when you have a very challenging public health crisis. They are nothing but distractions,” he said, adding: “Let somebody write a book about it later on. But not now.”
As has been widely reported, more convincing evidence suggests cases could be undercounted rather than overcounted. That’s because testing is still a problem in many areas of the country, and there may be a significant number of people who die of the disease but have not been diagnosed with it.
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Finally, we have what Trump said Tuesday: Even as some of his allies were playing up the idea that coronavirus death counts are being exaggerated, Trump insisted they are “very, very accurate.”
