To understand why the figures converge, even if they contain some uncertainty, it is important to know how they are collected and calculated. “We're pretty confident about the scale and order of magnitude of deaths, but we're not clear on the exact number yet,” says Justin Lessler, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The scope of the coronavirus's deadly toll is clear, even if the exact toll varies by a small fraction depending on the reporting system. The inaccurate idea that only 6 percent of the deaths were really caused by the coronavirus is “a gross misinterpretation” of how death certificates work, says Robert Anderson, chief mortality statistician at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. This number is supported by three lines of evidence, including death certificates. surpassed a quarter of a million people by November 2020. Now some facts: Researchers know beyond a doubt that the number of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. Representative Roger Marshall of Kansas-now incoming senator- complained that Facebook had removed a post in which he claimed that 94 percent of COVID-19 deaths reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “were the result of 2-3 additional serious illnesses and were of advanced age.” (The tweet originated from a follower of the debunked conspiracy fantasy QAnon.) Twitter removed the post for containing false information, but fabrications such as these continue to spread. In August, President Donald Trump retweeted a post claiming that only 6 percent of these reported deaths were actually from COVID-19. is now more than 350,000, as of the beginning of January, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.Ī persistent falsehood has been circulating on social media: the number of COVID deaths is much lower than official statistics, and therefore the danger of the disease has been overblown. However, the group had some challenges especially since each state reports information on possible infections differently, and some did not report at all, which made their job a bit harder.* Editor's Note (1/3/21): The number of COVID deaths in the U.S. "The goal was to measure whether the virus posed an equal-opportunity risk or whether all that historical baggage would determine who lives and dies," The Post wrote. They also added information on demographics such as racial breakdown, unemployment figures, and age distribution in each county, and finally, they did a comparison of county disease data to that of the entire state. The group added information on health-care capacity, which looked at how many ICU beds and the staff there were, how many people access the local health-care system, and through what time of insurance, private or public, to help give more context to the numbers. It just feels like the compassion is getting lost."īlauer told The Post that she noticed that when it came to charting data for the US, there needed to be more context to understand the fuller picture of what was happening, which is why they added additional sets of information that they hoped would help people make more sense of what was happening in specific locations. "The human connection - I think we need more of that in the larger national narrative. "This is the first time data has been such a central part of the narrative," Beth Blauer, the executive director of Johns Hopkins University's Centers for Civic Impact told The Post. "And they can be wrong for lots of different reasons.Īccording to The Post, the team of researchers behind the tracker is concerned that policymakers and the public are not seeing how the pandemic is impacted by things like healthcare, racial disparities, and income inequality in the US. But then, on the other hand, they can be wrong," Lauren Gardner, the associate professor at Johns Hopkins's Whiting School of Engineering told The Post. "Numbers in some ways instill this sense of comfort. While millions may be keeping track of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic using a tool from John Hopkins University that gathers numbers on how many have been infected, the creators say viewers are missing some important points amidst all the data, The Washington Post reported. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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