Death toll: Why it’s actually higher
America’s official tally of roughly 24,000 coronavirus deaths is “almost certainly” an undercount, said Jonathan Last in TheBulwark.com. Most coroners are attributing a death to the coronavirus only if the person received a positive test before dying—and many of the sick are not being tested because tests are in such short supply. And the official count does not include people who died at home, in nursing homes, or on the street without a test. That’s why New York City officials this week added 3,700 fatalities to its total to include people “presumed” to have died of Covid-19. The official count also overlooks many virus-related deaths from early in the outbreak, before testing began. In California, officials now believe returning Americans and visitors from China started spreading the virus in December and January. When researchers someday figure out how many people Covid-19 really killed, chances are that the real toll will exceed official totals by “quite a lot.”
In the alternative reality on Fox News, the official death toll is actually too high, said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. Fox host Brit Hume illogically claimed that doctors are wrong to automatically count people who have underlying conditions like cancer, heart disease, or diabetes as deaths from Covid-19, since in some cases, those underlying conditions may have killed them. No wonder Dr. Deborah Birx of the federal task force and other health officials have dismissed this attempt to lower the death count as nonsense. If someone has had an illness for years, “and suddenly dies within a week of getting the coronavirus, what are the odds that they would have died during that specific week without contracting the virus?”
Covid-19 skeptics also love to compare the coronavirus to the flu, said Jo Craven McGinty in
The Wall Street Journal. But while millions get influenza every year and tens of thousands die, that virus spreads far more slowly, over about a six-month period. Covid-19 is far more contagious, hitting hot spots like a “tidal wave” that overwhelms hospitals with severely sick people who need oxygen and ventilators just to survive. Nurses and doctors can be immunized against the flu; not so with the coronavirus, and many health-care workers are infected despite elaborate protection. Any nurse or doctor working on the front lines of this pandemic will tell you that Covid-19 is a nightmare far worse than the flu.