Right-Wing Media Stars Mislead on Covid-19 Death Toll - The New York Times

When the coronavirus death toll in the United States passed 200,000 on Tuesday, matching projections made by White House experts this spring, many of the right-wing media personalities who had mocked the estimates as overblown were quiet.

The death toll, tracked by Johns Hopkins University and a New York Times database, is most likely an undercount, many public health experts believe.

DID NOT SURPASS 200,000 COVID-19 DEATHS.” As evidence, he cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that 94 percent of the reported deaths involved underlying health problems and that 6 percent of the people who died had no illness or medical condition other than Covid-19.

statistic to make a case that the pandemic death toll was inflated, a false claim that was also promoted by a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory and amplified by President Trump in a post that Twitter removed last month.

3 noting that the cause of death as listed on a death certificate includes an immediate cause, intermediate causes, underlying causes and contributing conditions.

The department used an example to demonstrate how a person would be excluded from the C.D.C.’s 6 percent figure: if an immediate cause of death was acute respiratory distress syndrome, with pneumonia as the intermediate cause, Covid-19 as the underlying cause and asthma and diabetes as contributing causes.

At a rally this week, he repeated the misleading claim that young people faced very little risk, although thousands of people under 65 and many others who previously seemed in good health have fallen sick.

In some states thousands of people — nobody young, below the age of 18