Nate Silver Whacks Media for Reporting on ‘Rise’ in Coronavirus Cases; Axios Seems to Agree

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FiveThirtyEight editor Nate Silver whacked the media on Thursday for failing to contextualize the continued “rise” of coronavirus cases — calling it a “basic error” that was “revealing about the media’s goals.”

The tweet prompted at least one outlet to update a story to acknowledge that increases in testing have led to more cases being diagnosed.

Silver was opining on a tweet from former New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, who took issue with reporting from Axios and The New York Times. “Axios does a piece highlighting the growth in cases outside [New York], and, just like the NYT, doesn’t even mention the fact that at least some of that growth in recent weeks is the result of the sharp increase in testing,” Surowiecki wrote. In it, he linked an Axios report asserting the U.S. lagged behind Europe in coronavirus recovery, with the “number of new cases every day … not going down.”

Silver responded, “Not providing context on the increase in testing is such a basic error, and has been so widespread, that it’s revealing about the media’s goals. It’s more interested in telling plausibly-true stories (“narratives”) that sound smart to its audience than in accuracy/truth per se.”

Axios subsequently updated the story linked in the exchange, noting, “This story has been updated to clarify that increased testing could be part of the reason the number of cases in the U.S. is rising.”

The New York Times on Monday published a story containing similar claims, titled, “As Trump pushes to reopen, government sees virus toll nearly doubling.” That report cited revised figures from the Centers for Disease Control, which estimated deaths related to the virus would rise from 1,750 at the beginning of the month to 3,000 daily by June 1.

Whether new cases are emerging at a faster clip because of an increase in testing capacity has been a controversial one. Democratic officials have suggested the U.S. should remain closed until new cases decline, and have called on the president to invoke wartime authority to increase the number of tests being manufactured.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday acknowledged the dilemma. “The media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad,” he said at a meeting with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.

Testing has indeed increased since the virus began to spread in America. A total of 708,711 tests were conducted in the last week of March, according to the nonprofit COVID Tracking Project, less than half the 1,567,068 tests performed in the last week of April. That increase in testing has corresponded with a decline in the percentage of those testing positive — 12.7 percent in the last week of April compared to 18.7 percent during the same period in March.

Thus, while the raw number of Americans being infected has been increasing more precipitously as a result of greater testing, the percentage of those testing positive has also declined.

Unfortunately, it may take some time before testing reaches a level where those figures become truly helpful. The Harvard Global Health Institute said on Thursday that its modeling suggests the U.S. should be conducting around 900,000 tests daily.

Silver pointed out on Twitter that the media isn’t helping when it fails to explain the nuances of the debate. “Trump has figured this out! By focusing on case counts, the media creates disincentives to do more testing because it makes the numbers look superficially worse. One reason (not the only one) why we’re not pushing for testing as much as we should.”