Coronavirus Live Updates: White House Suggests U.S. Death Toll Is Inflated
President Trump ordered U.S. states to open houses of worship. A teenage girl crossed India — on a $20 bike — to get her father home safe amid the pandemic.
China on Saturday reported no new coronavirus deaths or symptomatic cases, the first time that both tallies were zero on a
given day since the country’s outbreak began.
Some White House officials suggest deaths are overcounted. Experts disagree.
As the United States continues its advance toward 100,000 coronavirus deaths, a grim milestone expected in the coming days, President Trump and members of his administration have begun questioning the official coronavirus death toll, suggesting the numbers are inflated.
In White House meetings, conversations with health officials have returned to similar suspicions: that the data compiled by state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention include people who have died with the coronavirus, but of other conditions.
Last Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he accepted the current death toll, but that the figures could be “lower than” the official count, which is now above 95,000.
But most statisticians and public health experts say the death toll is probably far higher than what is publicly known. People are dying at their houses and nursing homes without ever being tested, they say, and deaths early this year were likely misidentified as influenza or described only as pneumonia.
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, has said publicly that the American health care system incorporates a generous definition of a death caused by Covid-19.
“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the I.C.U., and then have a heart or kidney problem — some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a Covid-19 death,” she said at a White House news conference last month.
In a brief interview on Thursday, Dr. Birx stressed that there had been no pressure to alter data. But concerns about official statistics are not limited to the death toll, or to administration officials.
Epidemiologists said they were stunned to learn that the C.D.C. was combining data from tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from Covid-19 — a system that muddies the picture of the pandemic but raises the percentage of Americans tested as Mr. Trump boasts about testing.
Experts said that data from antibody tests and active virus tests should never be mixed.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida. “All of us are really baffled.”
Epidemiologists, state health officials and a spokeswoman for the C.D.C. said there was no ill intent; they attributed the flawed reporting system to confusion and fatigue in overworked state and local health departments that typically track infections — not tests — during outbreaks.
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