Covid-19 and the Age of Misinformation

I cannot follow the logic of some on the right. At first “the libs got it wrong. “We are only going to see 60k deaths. The projections were wrong.” As we approached 60k, the script changed. It was “well the CDC revised its count downward.” Then the media reports that, in fact, the count was not revised downward and the discrepancy you see is the difference between provisional deaths and confirmed deaths. For a death to be confirmed, you have to have a death certificate. It often takes weeks after a reported death to get a death certificate. If someone tests positive for covid-19 and then subsequently dies from complications, then it’s presumed to be caused by covid-19. That’s a logical assumption. There has been hardly any deaths that have been revised from the time of the presumed deaths until the time the death certificate confirms the death.

So now it’s “but Medicaid pays you hospitals more if doctors report the death as covid-19.” Yet again, that’s a fallacious conspiracy theory. The Republican Senator who made this crazy claim even backtracked his statement and said does not believe doctors are falsely reporting deaths as due to covid-19. The CARES act provided $100 billion dollars to hospitals to reimburse medical providers for treating the uninsured. There was a 20 percent add-on to be paid for Medicare patients with Covid-19. Think about how absurd that is and the potential for lawsuits based on fraud. That would be assuming doctors violate their Hippocratic oath to provide proper care, diagnoses and treatment. The evidence just does not support. Remember, a Republican-controlled Senate passed the CARES act that provided the funding.

The fact is there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary that supports that deaths are being underreported, not overreported. People are dying in their homes and outside medical facilities. These claims are all attempts to undermine the seriousness of this virus and to promote the economy over public health. These people live in an echo-chamber of inanity. They get their information from memes and viral posts that have not been vetted by the media or experts and they despise facts, science and data because it doesn’t fit their view of the world. What’s scary is no matter how much we attempt to educate the public with well-sourced information, many reject it because we live in an age of conspiracy theories, which are bolstered among the fringes on the left and the right equally.