New York Times Cites False CDC Covid Data, Inflating Pediatric Mortality Count

The CDC has been providing two sets of Covid mortality data for years. The agency knows one of them is inaccurate. Many journalists apparently do not.

An article in Saturday’s New York Times includes the following passage:

This is false. Nearly 2,300 American children and adolescents have not died from Covid.

There are two problems here. First, the CDC knows this number is wrong, but it shares this number publicly anyway. Second, many journalists, including the three New York Times reporters on this piece, continue to report these incorrect numbers.

This is the umpteenth example of our public health agencies providing misleading or outright incorrect information and journalists reporting it without making an attempt to verify its accuracy.

Let me briefly explain the problem with the statistic given in the NYT article:

The CDC maintains two different publicly available tallies of Covid deaths. One is accessible through the Covid Data Tracker demographics trends page. The mortality numbers on this dashboard “include probable COVID-19 cases and deaths,” and are derived from data “reported by state and territorial jurisdictions to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Screenshot of table of death statistics from the Covid Data Tracker page.

The way the NYT reporters got “nearly 2,300” was by adding the numbers from each of the pediatric age brackets, which totals to 2,281. The problem is these numbers are not correct, and the CDC knows they are not correct.