In the beginning, coronavirus denialism was easy. When widespread American deaths were still confined to the rising slopes of epidemiological models, skeptics could dismiss them as alarmist predictions. That included the nation’s most prominent coronavirus truther: “Just stay calm,” Donald Trump said on March 10, “it will go away.” Two months later, as the official death count pushes above 70,000, this approach is obsolete. The future has happened, so now it’s time to question the recent past.
On Wednesday, Axios reported that Trump has been complaining privately that official Covid-19 death numbers are inflated. According to an anonymous administration official, the president will soon begin to share this idea in public. Fox News, perhaps the most trusted source of information for the president and his followers, has already pushed the “deaths are exaggerated” theory, despite the fact that official death counts almost certainly understate the true death toll, because many people are dying, often at home, without being tested. So get ready for the Covid-19 information war to open a new front.
Questioning the death toll would be a savvy tactical shift for the forces of doubt. Counting the dead from a viral pandemic can be a much messier process than, say, assessing the casualties from a terrorist attack or even a natural disaster; we will never know the exact number. A widely shared New York Times analysis defines the “real” toll by looking at the difference between expected and actual deaths from all causes in March and April. But this approach has its weaknesses. The coronavirus is not the only thing that might be affecting mortality trends. In California and Texas, for example, deaths were well below expected levels in January; does that mean there was some kind of life-extending inverse pandemic going on? If someone avoids getting treatment for a heart condition because they’re afraid of catching Covid-19, should that go into the death toll? That’s a question for philosophers as much as epidemiologists.
As a result, the highly suspect claim that the death count is exaggerated can be smuggled into saner statements such as death tolls are uncertain or the numbers that you’re seeing in the media are misleadingly precise. The irreducible element of uncertainty is
