“The US’s health protection agency has reduced the number of deaths it is attributing to covid-19 by more than 70,000 after what it referred to as ‘coding logic errors’ were highlighted on social media.
On 15 March the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed 72,277 deaths, including those of 416 children, from its Covid-19 Data Tracker, which has been posting real time data collected from more than two dozen state health departments since April 2020…
The figures have been widely used by media outlets to report on deaths in the US. The UK’s Guardian newspaper, for example, carried an article on 11 March with the headline, ‘One-third of all US child Covid deaths occurred during Omicron surge.’ This cited CDC data to say that 550 children had died from covid-19 in the US in 2022, compared with 1017 children in the preceding 22 months. The Guardian later amended the story using figures from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which put child deaths at 179 during 2022, with 735 deaths in the preceding 20 months…
Bob Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics who also served on covid-19 response task forces, told The BMJ that this was essentially a case of accidentally capturing deaths ‘with’ rather than ‘from’ covid.”
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