What do all these news accounts have in common?
“Florida Sets Yet Another Coronavirus Record: 173 Deaths In A Day.”
“A record 173 Floridians died from the virus Thursday, an average of more than one every eight minutes.”
“The 134 new confirmed deaths is the second-largest increase on record, coming five days after the largest one-day jump of 156 last week.”
“COVID-19 has ravaged Florida, with more than 237,000 people testing positive and 2,013 dying from the virus in July alone.”
So what characteristic do all of the reports share? They are all false.
It is not true that 173 people died from COVID-19 “in a day” in Florida. Nor did 134, or 156 on previous days.
It is also untrue than 2,013 had died in July when that story was published.
All of these scary headlines are based on the number of deaths reported by the state on any given day. This is not the same as the number of deaths that occurred on those days.
The difference might seem trivial. But it’s crucial because the press is using the timing of Florida’s death reports to whip up a frenzy about COVID-19 running riot in the state.
Take a look at the chart below. The blue bars are the number of deaths reported in four days last week. Notice the sharp uphill climb? That’s the story the press has been telling.
But those deaths didn’t occur on those days. In fact, the vast majority of them occurred days, or even weeks, before. The actual date of these deaths is indicated by the orange bars.
In fact, as of Sunday, the biggest one-day death toll so far in the state happened back on July 16, when 114 are known to have died. And when the press was claiming that 2,013 had died in July, the actual number of known deaths was 1,847.
As we
noted in this space last week
, this distortion is being repeated by the media in state after state that has seen a recent spike in coronavirus cases. While deaths attributed to coronavirus have increased, the “surge” is a fiction because many of those deaths happened earlier.
But almost no news outlet explains this difference clearly to readers. The Miami Herald is one exception.
In a recent story,
it noted
— after shouting about hitting a new record for daily deaths — that “the 173 deaths …. does not necessarily mean that every person died in the past 24 hours. In Florida, the deaths announced on a given day could be from several days earlier because the state information does not include the exact date of death.”
But even the Herald didn’t have to leave readers guessing as to how many of those 173 died in the previous 24 hours. Florida’s COVID-19 tracking site had it right on the main page. Of the 173 reported, the number of people who actually died that day was … 19.
This is only one of the problems with the death counts being shouted from the media rooftops.
Here again, Florida serves as a model of how to sow fear.
First there’s the missing context.
While 173 deaths reported in a single day sounds like a lot, it pales in comparison to the peak reached in New York and New Jersey earlier this spring.
New York’s reported deaths topped 1,000 on more than one day in April. That’s in a state with 9% fewer people than Florida.
New Jersey’s peak was 523 on April 20. That’s three times the current “record” set in Florida — in a state that has 59% fewer residents.
Another way to look at it is that the death rate in Florida at the moment is 273 per million residents. In New York, it’s 1,680 and in New Jersey it’s 1,785.
In other words, the current situation in Florida is nothing at all like what happened in the northeast in the spring. Yet that critical information never gets conveyed by the press.
Another bit of missing context is where these deaths are occurring.
That’s not to say these deaths are less important. But it does provide a needed backdrop for everyone else in the state. Their risk is tiny by comparison.
This finding also shows that what’s needed most is to protect at-risk populations, something that the generalized lockdowns failed to do. Pretending that coronavirus “doesn’t discriminate” is a dangerous fiction.
Then there’s the fact that Florida’s death count is almost certainly inflated because the state is counting people who died with the virus, not just those who died because of it.
- A 60-year-old man who died from a gunshot wound to the head.
- A 90-year-old man who fell and died from complications of a hip fracture.
- A 77-year-old woman who died of Parkinson’s disease.
Out of 581 deaths attributed to coronavirus in that county, “The I-Team found eight cases in which a person was counted as a COVID death, but did not have COVID listed as a contributing cause of death.”
What’s more, only 169 deaths were listed as due to coronavirus without any other contributing factors.
(As a side note, why is a local TV news team digging into the numbers, while the national media are content to repeat whatever the government tells them?)
The question that deserves to be answered is why the mainstream press seems so willing and eager to whip up fear, rather than provide all the relevant facts, in context, so the public can make its own informed decisions about how to respond to this disease.
Remember the stories blaming America’s virus resurgence on states reopening too fast and praising other countries for crushing the virus with lockdowns? Well, flare-ups are now occurring in several countries that recently eased their lockdowns and travel restrictions. Victory declarations anywhere are premature.
New cases doubled in Spain over the weekend and are up six-fold in a month. Government officials have tied cases to migrant farm workers, tourists, family gatherings and young people partying. Catalonia, a tourist region known for vineyards and beaches, this weekend ordered the closure of night clubs and late-night bars. “Certain generations haven’t remained vigilant,” Spain Ministry of Health emergency director Fernando Simón said. Governors Doug Ducey of Arizona and Greg Abbott of Texas can sympathize.
The United Kingdom has imposed a quarantine on travelers returning from Spain, which could be a blow to its tourism industry and economy that are trying to revive. But as Spanish officials point out, flare-ups have occurred across Europe since countries reopened their borders and economies a month ago.
Germany recently reported an outbreak in Bavaria tied to migrant farm workers from Romania. Last week France’s Directorate General of Health warned “the circulation of the virus is increasing” after the country recorded more than 200 outbreaks. France is recording twice as many new cases per day as two weeks ago and last week mandated masks in public spaces.
Australia’s new daily cases have increased 11-fold in the last month. Cases have increased though Australia’s government locked down Melbourne. Civil disobedience is rife. Nearly 90% of the infected didn’t isolate between the time they started showing symptoms and were tested, Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews recently noted. More than half of those infected didn’t isolate after being tested and when they got their results.
Japan and Hong Kong—both hailed as models of infection control—are also experiencing flare-ups tied to travelers and social gatherings. Japan’s daily new cases have increased six-fold in the last month. Hong Kong is reporting 136 new cases each day on average, up from two four weeks ago, and on Monday it banned dine-in restaurants and gatherings of more than two.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he doesn’t believe it’s necessary to shut down businesses since most cases so far are among young people and hospitals have ample capacity. This is the same approach most Republican states are taking, and that Arizona, Texas and Florida took until some hospitals became strained.
Democrats blame the U.S. case surge on inadequate testing and contact tracing. But the U.S. has averaged two to three times more tests per capita than most European and Asian countries. Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas all were doing more tests per capita when they lifted their lockdowns than Germany, Spain, France and South Korea have averaged.
More testing can help isolate infected individuals and identify asymptomatic cases. Delays in returning testing results in the U.S. has made it harder for states to do contact tracing. But contact tracers in many places, including the U.K. and New York, have reported other logistical challenges including getting people to share personal information.
In any case, more testing and contact tracing won’t do much good if people don’t self-quarantine or can’t because they live with family in cramped housing. The latter is a problem in many U.S. hot spots. Mandating face masks could reduce spread in public settings but isn’t a panacea, especially if young people don’t comply and ignore social distancing.
Spanish night clubs required face masks, but pictures showed young people wearing them on their chins. Most people in U.S. hot spots were wearing face masks before governments mandated them. According to global data firm Dynata, face mask use in early July was around 80% in Houston, southeast Florida and New York City.
***
Amid the post-lockdown flare-ups, it’s worth revisiting Sweden, which has been widely criticized for never closing businesses and primary schools. Cases have been falling over the past month after a modest uptick in June due to more testing. Only 27 patients have died in the last week, fewer per capita than New York.
America’s liberals cite Sweden’s relatively high death rate (56 per 100,000 compared to 45.1 in France and 35.8 in the Netherlands). But two-thirds of deaths have been among those over age 80, and 97% never received intensive-care treatment. Blame Sweden’s socialized health system, which rationed treatment for the elderly even though ICUs were never overwhelmed.
The lesson is that the virus won’t disappear anytime soon. Governments may have to impose some business and social restrictions to protect hospitals and the vulnerable. But lockdowns aren’t a miracle cure, and their collateral damage is too severe to sustain.
