Dissecting Misinformation: A Covid Example

"Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is communicated regardless of an intention to deceive"

Disinformation is similar but information that is intentionally meant to deceive.  Delineating the two is both increasingly difficult and probably ultimately mostly irrelevant in most cases.  We see mis or dis-information all the time on social media.  Someone posted this and I thought that seems odd so I have taken the time to dissect it.

I will start by pointing out, I see posts beginning with "hmmm" all the time and just about every time they are a tell that the post is of, being generous here, dubious veracity.  Saying "hmmm" implies one is not really willing to stand behind a statement but by golly they are going to insinuate something usually nefarious just the same.  In other words the person is gaslighting or just merely being lame.

So about those numbers.  The post appears to show worldwide numbers.  But worldwide numbers are notoriously inaccurate.  All numbers are estimates and the U.S. has its own problems defining numbers but I believe a better way to assess the numbers would be to focus on the U.S.  And frankly given the America First-ism usually employed by those posting these things I believe it makes even more sense.

The Spanish Flu.  It was a terrible pandemic killing millions worldwide and its mortality rate was apparently materially higher than Covid.  Understanding, of course, medical science at the time was vastly inferior to contemporary medicine, basically if one caught the virus, they put you in a clean bed if available, provided liquids and an occasional cool cloth for your forehead .  The notion of ventilators and ameliorative medicines was largely non-existent. Importantly, the vast majority of those millions occurred internationally (perhaps 10MM+ in India alone).  Researchers have never agreed on how many million died but the estimates range from about 12MM to perhaps 50MM out of a population just short of 2 billion.  So right there you see whomever prepared the above chart, grabbed the high estimate of deaths and compared it to a wrong population base.  Hmmm...makes one wonder about the author's motives.😁 

What about the U.S? The CDC estimates 675,000 Americans died from the Spanish Flu out of a population of about 106MM or .67% of total population.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html

The seasonal flu.  This one has been mangled repeatedly and shamefully to the point, if I see it I immediately want to turn away and go "hmmm, I guess this person really is a willful dumbass".  The CDC estimates annual flu deaths in the U.S. over the past decade to have varied from about 12,000 to 61,000 in the worst year (2017-18, which is naturally the year the author of the meme cherry picked...hmmm). There is a reason while you probably know many who have had the flu including yourself, you likely do not know anyone who was gravely or fatally afflicted with the flu.  There is a reason as well one does not recall many if any public figures who have been killed by the "flu" in contrast to Covid.  Furthermore, even the CDC numbers, as low as they are, are derived by comparing excess death rates over time usually a couple years or longer ex post facto.  Just about everything I have read (despite the protestations of the Covid deniers to the contrary) indicates once researchers are able to review 2020-21 deaths they will find we have materially underestimated Covid related deaths here in the U.S.  Internationally the underestimates are believed be far more material as the public health information in many international countries is incomplete and/or riven with political bias (even more so than in say Florida). https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

Covid. Per Worldometer as of the end of the day 12/12/2020- 305,000 Americans had died out of a population of 333MM or 0.1%.  Currently deaths are averaging 2,500 per day. Hence by the time vaccines have ended the spread and impacts of Covid we will have likely suffered somewhere 450,000 to 500,000 deaths or 0.15 to .20% of total U.S. population.  So is Covid likely less impactful than the Spanish Flu? Yes.  But having a pandemic kill perhaps 500,000 Americans is an historically awful result.  A result arising despite modern medicine, despite what will hopefully turn out to be a very rapid vaccine development and a result helped by massive mitigation efforts in the form of social distancing etc.  

Net net those folks who post charts like above are not only wrong they are at this point given what we know about the disease, what we know about the pressures it puts on our medical system, and what we know about the horrible way most end up dying alone and in pain. Well I think they are worse than foolish, they are something worse. 

But ultimately this post is not about Covid denial it is about how folks take data manipulate it to serve an agenda with just enough obtusely provided truth that the meme makes enough sense for other folks to spread it far and wide so that their fellow travelers can jump on the threads and cheer the misinformation on with their own snark and in the process make us all just a little bit more stupid.