To date, more than 183,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19 and more than 6 million have been infected. While leaders in other countries have moved quickly to contain the virus, U.S. have drawn international attention for their failure to respond to a grave public health issue, choosing instead to repeatedly downplay the severity of the pandemic.
Now, those who deny the existence or even the danger of COVID-19 have picked up a new piece of data to bolster their claims: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 6% of reported COVID-19 deaths cited the virus as the sole cause of death, meaning the other 94% had additional health problems at the time of their death (called comorbidities). This thinking isn’t just morally repugnant—it’s also a simple misunderstanding of statistics.
This all seems to have started with a tweet from a follower of the conspiracy theory group QAnon, who misinterpreted this statistic to mean that only 6% of these deaths were “actually” from COVID. The tweet went viral after President Donald Trump retweeted it.
Twitter tweet and told the Washington Post that it violated the site's policies on coronavirus. However, the claims continue to circulate online — and they align with previous conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that hospitals are intentionally inflating their reporting of coronavirus patients or that public health departments are overstating COVID-19 death tolls.
The fundamental flaw in this new conspiracy theory is the assumption that the only “true” coronavirus deaths are those that list only COVID-19 as the cause of death. However, having co-morbidities alongside COVID-19 does not make these deaths outside the scope of the virus. Some of these co-morbidities are caused by COVID-19. For example, according to CDC data, more than 14,000 people have died from sepsis, which is known to develop in COVID-19 patients. More than 54,000 people – about 30% of total deaths in the US – have respiratory failure as a co-morbidity. COVID-19 is proven to cause major respiratory problems.
Even if the co-morbidities of virus victims are not directly caused by COVID-19, the virus could still be the leading cause of death. The CDC lists certain long-term health conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure as co-morbidities. Since the beginning of the pandemic, experts have warned that people with these conditions may be at higher risk of contracting the virus and may suffer more severe effects from it. Consider that many people with diabetes and high blood pressure are completely fine until they get COVID-19. It is entirely possible to live a good life with these conditions, especially if they are properly managed. While diabetes and high blood pressure may have complicated people’s normal responses to COVID-19, it is still the virus that killed them.
In addition to being wrong, this conspiracy theory is also cruel. The original post states that “94% of people who died from COVID-19 had other serious illnesses, and the vast majority were very old.” This argument suggests that death must somehow be acceptable or expected for people who are older or have serious illnesses. Minimizing these deaths may be comforting to younger people, but there are 52 million people in the U.S. who are over 65, and millions more who have at least one condition commonly referred to as a comorbidity. For example, 9.4% of people in the U.S. have diabetes. The CDC says that 6 in 10 Americans have at least one chronic health condition.
As death from COVID-19 has become a daily occurrence, it is easy for the living – especially those in denial – to forget that behind these statistics are real people: They were parents, neighbors, spouses, siblings, friends, doctors. The scale of the loss is unimaginable, and we hope this all ends soon.
