Journalists Debate Accuracy of U.S. Official Covid Death Toll: ‘Overcounting Fed The Panic’ vs. ‘Still Looking for Ways to Downplay Things’
Journalists on Twitter had mixed responses to the news that Alameda County in California removed approximately 400 deaths from its Covid death tally to better match state guidelines. The county had previously included the deaths of anyone who tested positive for Covid-19, regardless of whether or not the virus played a role in causing the death.
After Alex Berenson wrote that the county overcounting by 25% “is in line with my estimate of overcounting nationally,” people were quick to debate the accuracy of the U.S.’s official Covid death toll, currently totaling almost 600,000, with some arguing the figure is too high and others too low.
Fox News’ Brit Hume responded that the “overcounting fed the panic that produced the lockdowns, school closings and other regrettable decisions.”
Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo, hit back that Hume was “relying on a false claim from a chronic liar.” Marshall then linked to another tweet that contained a quote from an Alameda County health officer that said he was unaware of other counties using the same classification system the county had been using.
CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy also condemned Hume for “looking for ways to downplay things.”
“Never forget that in the early stages of the pandemic, Brit’s network asserted Covid was like the seasonal flu and mocked those who warned about its severity,” Darcy wrote. “Hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US later and Brit is still looking for ways to downplay things.”
CNN’s Jon Passantino chimed in as well, noting that “if anything, we have consistently undercounted the true toll from Covid-19 with excess death estimates hundreds of thousands higher than the official count.”
Passantino added in a second tweet, “And while critics seize on one California county’s potential overcount, the state today reported 228 additional Covid-related deaths, 186 of which were previously unreported by another county [San Mateo county].”
