Fox News says the coronavirus death toll is inflated. Experts say the opposite.
福克斯新聞說，冠狀病毒死亡人數被誇大了。專家們的看法恰恰相反。
Andrew Romano 安德魯·羅馬諾
Yahoo News 雅虎新聞April 9, 2020, 9:20 PM GMT+82020年4月9日，格林尼治標準時間晚上9:20 +8
In his 2014 book “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” journalist Gabriel Sherman reported that top Fox News executives meet every morning to strategize about how the network can angle its daily coverage to advance the Republican Party’s political agenda.
記者加布裡埃爾·謝爾曼(Gabriel Sherman)在2014年出版的《房間裡最響亮的聲音》(The高聲吶喊)一書中寫道，福克斯新聞的高管們每天早上都會開會，制定戰略，討論如何調整每日報道的角度，以推進共和黨的政治議程。
After first downplaying the threat of the coronavirus, then accusing Democrats of overhyping it to hurt President Trump, then claiming the “cure” of shutting down the economy could be worse than the disease, Fox News’ hosts now seem to be following a new set of marching orders when discussing the deadly pathogen: questioning whether all that many people are really dying from it.
後首先淡化冠狀病毒的威脅,然後指責民主黨人炒作它傷害總統特朗普,然後聲稱的“治癒”關閉經濟可能比疾病,福克斯新聞的主機現在似乎一套新的逐客令之後在討論致命的病原體:質疑,很多人都是真的死於它。
Like each of its predecessors, Fox’s latest pandemic talking point — that the coronavirus death toll could be exaggerated because it includes individuals who had other health issues in addition to COVID-19 — doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
福克斯最新的流感大流行話題——冠狀病毒死亡人數可能被誇大了，因為它包括除了covid19之外還有其他健康問題的人——和前幾期一樣，經不起推敲。
“We’ve made it very clear, every time I’ve been up here, about the comorbidities,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. coronavirus response coordinator, said Wednesday during the White House coronavirus task force press briefing. “This has been known from the beginning. So those individuals will have an underlying condition, but that underlying condition did not cause their acute death when it’s related to a COVID infection.”
週三，美國冠狀病毒應對協調員Deborah Birx博士在白宮的冠狀病毒工作組新聞發佈會上說:“每次我來這裡，我們都非常清楚地說明了共病的情況。”這事從起頭就知道了。所以這些人會有潛在的疾病，但這種潛在的疾病不會導致他們的急性死亡，當它與急性感染有關時。”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, also made a point to weigh in, cautioning against such “conspiracy theories.”
美國頂級傳染病專家安東尼·福奇(Anthony Fauci)博士也提出了自己的看法，對這種“陰謀論”提出了警告。
“They are nothing but distractions,” Fauci said. “Let somebody write a book about it later on. But not now.”
“它們只是讓人分心的東西，”福奇說。“以後讓別人寫一本關於它的書。但不是現在。”
Yet that didn’t stop former Fox News host Brit Hume from appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday to speculate that the overall U.S. death toll — by Thursday, more than 14,800 and rising — may be inflated.
然而，這並沒有阻止前福克斯新聞主持人布里特·休姆在週二的塔克·卡爾森的節目中推測，美國的死亡總人數——截至週四，超過14800人，並且還在上升——可能被誇大了。
“There are lots of people who are asymptomatic who may have other terrible diseases,” Hume said. “And if everybody is being automatically classified, if they’re found to have COVID-19, as a COVID-19 death, we’re going to get a very large number of deaths that way, and we’re probably not going to have an accurate count of what the real death total is.”
“有很多人沒有症狀，但他們可能患有其他可怕的疾病，”休謨說。“如果每個人都被自動分類，如果他們被發現有covid19，也就是covid19死亡，我們將會得到非常多的死亡人數，我們可能不會有一個準確的死亡總數。”
Carlson agreed, adding that “there may be reasons people seek an inaccurate death count” and that “when journalists work with numbers, there sometimes is an agenda.”
卡爾森對此表示贊同，並補充說，“人們尋求不準確的死亡人數可能是有原因的”，“當記者處理數字時，有時會有一個議程”。
As if on cue, Fox anchor Harris Faulkner joined the chorus Wednesday — even though she is a member of the network’s news division, not an opinion host like Carlson or an analyst like Hume.
就在這個時候，福克斯新聞主播哈里斯·福克納週三也加入了這一行列——儘管她是該電視臺新聞部門的一員，而不是像卡爾森那樣的觀點主持人，也不是像休謨那樣的分析師。
“The federal government now is classifying all COVID-19 patient deaths as such, regardless of whether any other underlying health issues were a factor,” Faulkner said before playing a clip of Birx confirming that “if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”
福克納在播放Birx確認“如果有人死於covid19，我們就把它算作covid19死亡”的片段之前說，“聯邦政府現在將所有covid19患者的死亡分類，不管是否有其他潛在的健康問題是一個因素。”
“How many of those people had other health risks at play, though, and maybe it wasn’t in fact COVID-19 that caused their death?” Faulkner asked.
“然而，這些人中有多少人在遊戲中有其他健康風險，也許不是COVID-19導致了他們的死亡?””福克納問道。
Despite the furrowed brows on Fox, however, Faulkner’s question isn’t all that hard to answer. According to actual experts, if there’s any problem with the COVID-19 death count, it’s not that it’s too high.
儘管福克斯皺著眉頭，福克納的問題並不難回答。據實際的專家說，如果COVID-19的死亡人數有什麼問題的話，那不是因為它太高了。
It’s that it’s too low.
而是太低了。
Fox News’s Harris Faulkner. (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
福克斯新聞的哈里斯·福克納。(羅伊Rochlin /蓋蒂圖片社)
The first thing to note is that despite all the innuendo on Fox, there is nothing unusual about the way the media or the government is counting coronavirus deaths. In any crisis — whether it’s a pandemic or a hurricane — people with preexisting conditions will die. The standard for attributing such deaths to the current crisis is determining whether those people would have died when they did even if the current crisis had never happened.
首先要注意的是，儘管福克斯電視臺的報道含沙射影，但媒體和政府對冠狀病毒死亡的統計方式並沒有什麼不同尋常之處。在任何危機中——無論是大流行還是颶風——具有先前存在條件的人將會死亡。將此類死亡歸咎於當前危機的標準是，確定即使當前危機從未發生，這些人也會不會死。
When it comes to the coronavirus, the data is clear: COVID-19 is much more likely to kill you if your system has already been compromised by some other ailment, such as asthma, HIV, diabetes mellitus, chronic lung disease or cardiovascular disease. But that doesn’t mean patients with those health problems would have died this week (or last week, or next month) no matter what. The vast majority of them probably wouldn’t have. COVID-19 was the catalyst — the reason they died now and not later.
當談到冠狀病毒時，數據很清楚:如果你的系統已經受到其他疾病的危害，如哮喘、艾滋病毒、糖尿病、慢性肺病或心血管疾病，COVID-19更有可能殺死你。但這並不意味著有這些健康問題的病人會在本週(或上週，或下個月)死亡，無論發生什麼。他們中的絕大多數可能不會。COVID-19是催化劑——是他們現在而不是以後死去的原因。
Given the potentially large number of asymptomatic cases circulating in the population, it’s possible, as Hume suggested, that some number of people who never got sick from the coronavirus but tested positive and then died from a different underlying cause are being mistakenly counted as COVID-19 deaths. But that number is likely to be vanishingly small, for one simple reason: People who don’t feel sick aren’t getting tested.
考慮到人群中可能存在大量的無症狀病例，就像休謨所說的那樣，可能有一些人從未因冠狀病毒而患病，但檢測結果呈陽性，然後死於另一種潛在原因，這些人被錯誤地統計為covid19死亡。但這個數字可能微乎其微，原因很簡單:沒有感到不舒服的人沒有接受檢測。
Much larger is the number of people who aren’t getting tested even though they have experienced symptoms. And that’s why, contra Fox News, experts say the coronavirus death toll is almost certainly an undercount. As Birx noted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts only deaths in which the presence of the coronavirus is confirmed by a test. But as the New York Times reported Sunday, “inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision making from one state or county to the next” have made it impossible to test every likely coronavirus death. Victims with flulike symptoms in February and early March weren’t tested. Victims in rural areas, where coroners say they don’t have the tools they need to detect the disease, still aren’t being tested. Victims who die at home or in overburdened nursing homes aren’t being tested.
更多的人沒有接受檢查，即使他們已經經歷了症狀。這就是為什麼，福克斯新聞，專家說冠狀病毒死亡人數幾乎肯定是被低估了。正如Birx所指出的那樣，美國疾病控制與預防中心只統計了經檢測證實存在冠狀病毒的死亡人數。但正如《紐約時報》(New York Times)週日報道的那樣，“協議不一致、資源有限，以及各州或縣之間的決策拼湊”，使得檢測每一例可能的冠狀病毒死亡病例成為不可能。2月和3月初出現類似流感症狀的患者沒有接受檢測。農村地區的受害者仍然沒有接受檢測，因為那裡的驗屍官說他們沒有檢測這種疾病所需的工具。那些死在家中或負擔過重的養老院的受害者沒有接受檢測。
Meanwhile, “postmortem testing by medical examiners varies widely across the country, and some officials say testing the dead is a misuse of scarce resources that could be used on the living,” the Washington Post reported over the weekend. “In addition, some people who have the virus test negative, experts say.”
與此同時，據《華盛頓郵報》(the Washington Post)上週末報道，“全國各地的驗屍官對死者進行屍檢的做法差異很大，一些官員表示，對死者進行屍檢是對稀缺資源的濫用，而這些稀缺資源本可以用於生者。”“此外，專家說，有些人的病毒檢測呈陰性。”
“You can’t rely on just the laboratory-confirmed cases,” Marc-Alain Widdowson, an epidemiologist who left the CDC last year and now serves as director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp in Belgium, told the Post. “You’re never going to apply the test on everybody who is ill and everybody who dies. So without doubt — it’s a truism — the number of deaths are underestimated globally.”
流行病學家Marc-Alain Widdowson在接受《華盛頓郵報》採訪時表示:“你不能僅僅依靠實驗室確診的病例。”他去年離開CDC，現在擔任比利時安特衛普熱帶醫學研究所所長。“你永遠不可能把這個測試應用到每個生病和死去的人身上。毫無疑問，全球死亡人數被低估了。”
When adjudicating debates over the data, it’s worth checking both sides’ sources. In the case of the Times, the Post and other mainstream news outlets, these sources include “hospital officials, doctors, public health experts and medical examiners.” Fox News’ sources, on the other hand, appear to be right-wing media figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. “People die on this planet every day,” Limbaugh said during an April 2 segment on the “massive speculation” that virus patients may actually be “dying because of other things”; Levin has suggested that “heart failure, heart disease, a heart attack” may account for an “inflated” and “extraordinarily misleading” number of reported COVID-19 fatalities.
在對數據爭論進行裁決時，有必要檢查雙方的數據來源。以《紐約時報》、《華盛頓郵報》和其他主流新聞媒體為例，這些消息來源包括“醫院官員、醫生、公共衛生專家和醫學檢查人員”。另一方面，福克斯新聞的消息來源似乎是拉什·林堡和馬克·萊文等右翼媒體人物。“這個星球上每天都有人死亡，”林堡在4月2日關於“大量猜測”的節目中說，病毒患者可能實際上“死於其他原因”;萊文認為，“心力衰竭、心臟病、心臟病發作”可能是導致報告中19例死亡病例的“誇大”和“嚴重誤導”的原因。
“I have suspected this for weeks,” Levin crowed Tuesday on Twitter.
“我已經懷疑了幾個星期了，”萊文週二在Twitter上得意地說道。
Yet when Faulkner asked her panel Wednesday whether comorbidities were inflating the overall COVID-19 death count, Fox News medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat said, “I don’t think it’s going to be a huge discrepancy in the data in the end.”
然而，當福克納週三問她的小組，共病是否導致了covid19死亡人數的增加時，福克斯新聞(Fox News)的醫學撰稿人珍妮特·內舍瓦特(Janette Nesheiwat)博士說，“我不認為最終的數據會有很大的差異。”
A day earlier, even Trump himself described the death count as “very, very accurate.”
一天前，就連特朗普自己也稱死亡人數“非常非常準確”。
“When you say death counts, I think they’re pretty accurate on the death counts,” Trump said. “The death counts, I think, they are very, very accurate.”
川普說:“當你說死亡有價值時，我認為他們在死亡的價值上是相當準確的。”“我認為，死亡人數非常非常準確。”
Cover thumbnail photo: Alex Brandon/AP, Roy Rochlin/Getty Images封面縮略圖:亞歷克斯·布蘭登/美聯社，羅伊·羅克林/蓋蒂圖片社
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