As the US Covid-19 death toll continues to rise (more than 183,000 as of September 1), so has the number of people who believe that the official death count is vastly inflated.
According to a July Axios-Ipsos poll, almost one in three people surveyed in the US thought the number of Covid-19 deaths was lower than what was being reported.
Some of the high-profile death skeptics, like author Alex Berenson, believe the media is deliberately sensationalizing deaths. Others note that many of these people were older and might have died during the same period anyway.
President Trump in April argued that many of the dead had preexisting conditions and that these preexisting conditions were the “true” causes of their deaths.
Then came a new claim that went viral over the weekend: that only 6 percent of US pandemic deaths have been from Covid-19 itself. The origin was a statistic from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that 94 percent of people killed by the new coronavirus in the US had comorbidities, or other health conditions contributing to their cause of death.
Although assigning causes of death isn’t straightforward, disease experts and scientists have quickly taken to Twitter and TikTok to point out that the 6 percent figure has been wildly misinterpreted.
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Source: The CDC’s 6% Covid-19 deaths statistic, explained by a cognitive scientist – Vox