NYT Falsely Reports COVID’s CFR is 3%, Overstating it Several-Fold

Earlier today, Apoorva Mandavilli, the New York Times’ go-to journaler of Covid “science,” published a real masterpiece of agitprop titled The Coronavirus May Spread From Corpses, Scientists Report.

Even if the headline isn’t enough, the Times managed to overstate COVID’s case fatality rate (CFR) by more than three-fold, falsely stating that “about 3 percent of those diagnosed with Covid-19” die.

No mainstream source shows Covid’s cumulative CFR to be over 1%, and the current rate is considerably lower. Of course this is also far higher than Covid’s infection fatality rate (IFR), a better measure of the actual risk posed by the disease, which the latest studies have shown was never more than 0.1% for those under 70.

This, of course, is in keeping with a long line of extreme statistical misstatements that have been published by Ms. Mandavilli in the New York Times over the past three years. On October 7, 2021, Mandavilli wrote that over 900,000 children had been hospitalized for COVID during 2020 and 2021. The Times quietly published a correction that the real number was just 63,000, meaning 900,000 was a 14-fold overstatement.

On May 19, 2022, Mandavilli wrote that over 4,000 children had died of multisystem inflammatory syndrome associated with Covid-19. The real number was just 63. The Times again quietly published a correction.

These corrections are often far less noticed by core New York Times readers than the original articles. Also, isn’t it odd that Mandavilli and the Times keep erring so egregiously in just one direction?

---

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.