Sunday night, Trump aired his own doubts to ABC’s David Muir, when he was asked about the ongoing updates of various coronavirus death models, several of which had recently been revised upward to reflect newly relaxed social-distancing guidelines in several states.
“First of all, these models have been so wrong from Day One. Both on the low side and the upside. They’ve been so wrong, they’ve been so out of whack,” he said. “We can be in place, work in place, and also mitigate. We’ve done it right, but now we have to get back to work.”
Public health veterans and those who study how information is disseminated said shifting predictions are common in emergency situations, which only fuels conspiracy theories.
“Finding anomalous data during extraordinary circumstances is not unsuspected,” said Dr. Jane Donovan, research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Institute, who studies misinformation. “It’s just that right now we have a set of armchair epidemiologists who are looking for discrepancies everywhere and turning them into conspiracies.”
Lobelo said counting the presumptive deaths was scientifically accurate, saying that flu-related deaths were counted the same way, even if the primary cause was different.
“The cause of death could be a heart attack, or cardiac arrest,” he said. “But if you’re able to identify Covid-19 in a patient that had heart disease, and that actually died because of a heart attack, you really do know that Covid-19 is the actual cause of death. Otherwise that patient would have not died, despite having that risk factor.”
Axios reported Wednesday that behind the scenes, Trump has been telling advisers that he thinks the death toll is being inflated, pointing to New York’s recent addition of 3,700 more fatalities to its overall count. City health officials said the additions represented cases where a patient was never tested for the coronavirus, but was likely to have died from it.
One theory Trump reportedly floated was that hospitals were overdiagnosing Covid-19 deaths in order to receive financial benefits from Medicare, a baseless theory that Donovan said she’d spotted online weeks ago, spread by right-wing commentators. However, she added, this was from a period when the supply of test kits was low and doctors were left to make the determination themselves — a situation similar to the reporting on death certificates.
“It takes time to document, record, aggregate and publish data,” she noted.
The result is that, like many things during Trump’s presidency, the death toll has become politicized. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found 40 percent of Republicans said the death toll was overreported, while 65 percent of Democrats said it was underreported. The poll noted that people who watched Fox News were more likely to believe the death toll was overreported.
Young said conservatives were more likely to distrust outlets running with the death toll offered by leading researchers.
“Why would a conservative, Republican, or Trump supporter, after seeing those consistent left-leaning commentary decisions, continue to view that source as unbiased and trustworthy?” he said.
Politics aside, Lobelo said the factor driving people’s suspicion of the models “all boils down to uncertainty.”
“The scientists are used to uncertainty because that’s how we operate. That’s part of the scientific premise of trial and error until you have a better understanding of the complex issue,” he said. “But for regular day-to-day people, uncertainty is more difficult to tolerate.”
Fox News anchor Ed Henry agreed with this assertion during a Tuesday appearance on the network.
“I think the bottom line is, people are wondering, are these models that seem very confusing and all over the place, that’s what’s being used to decide whether or not people remain on lockdown,“ he said. „And that’s getting some people frustrated.”
Source: politico.com
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