Thread by @ErrataRob

I'm disappointed in fact checkers do such a poor job debunking that "just 6% were actually caused by covid" thing.
factcheck.afp.com/trump-retweets…

What happened: a crazy conspiracy theorist saw a perfectly normal CDC report, misunderstood it, and then that misunderstanding went viral when the President retweeted it.

I think the first thing any "debunking" or "fact checking" needs to do is address why we are all talking about it? It also needs to address the agenda, not so much the "only 6%" number, but the implication the CDC was hiding it and suddenly revealed it August 30th.

The CDC has been analyzing comorbidities (other diseases/conditions a patient may have) from the beginning, such as this January 24 showing what other conditions patients had in Chinese infections.
cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…

It's been reporting since mid-May that 6%-7% have no other cause or condition other than the covid listed on their death certificate. It means simply that, and you shouldn't extrapolate meaning too far.

Attribution is hard. If somebody with a minor covid infection dies from a heart attack, what's the real "cause"? Nobody really knows, and different countries count differently. But only slightly differently, the variation in how they count is not as wide as you think.

Luckily, there's a way to check whether you are correctly attributing causes of death: by looking at "excess deaths" regardless of cause, such as this chart. For example, back in January of 2018, there was a spike in SOMETHING causing excess deaths. (Flu, actually).

If you look closer at the numbers you'll see that instead of over-attributing deaths by covid, we've been slightly undercounting them, especially during the peak back on April 11.

Instead of 153k being too high, it appears that it's too low, that the real number is between 185k and 245k.

There are lots of people crunching numbers to find out what's really going on. The Economist has a GitHub page with all their data so you can reproduce their results.
github.com/TheEconomist/c…

Everyone wants to blame (or credit, as appropriate) politicians. I don't think political leaders have that much influence over the course of the disease, but even if they did, the United States numbers aren't bad when compared to Europe.

The following take is also mostly wrong. It claims that "those without co-morbidities have a very low chance of dying". Um, no. While some comorbidities are unrelated (e.g. diabetes), other comorbidities are caused by the disease (e.g. pneumonia).

https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1300075931458064384

The CDC page in question has all this information broken down in different ways, with explanations, and links to raw data so you can come up with different interpretations.
cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr…

The purpose of this thread is to demonstrate the inherent flaw in social media, the way misunderstandings go viral. Our instinctive response should not be hot-takes and retweets, but going back to the original data being discussed, with lots of citations.