Fox News says the coronavirus death toll is inflated. Experts say the opposite.
福克斯新闻说，冠状病毒死亡人数被夸大了。专家们的看法恰恰相反。
Andrew Romano 安德鲁·罗马诺
Yahoo News 雅虎新闻April 9, 2020, 9:20 PM GMT+82020年4月9日，格林尼治标准时间晚上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.
记者加布里埃尔·谢尔曼(Gabriel Sherman)在2014年出版的《房间里最响亮的声音》(The高声呐喊)一书中写道，福克斯新闻的高管们每天早上都会开会，制定战略，讨论如何调整每日报道的角度，以推进共和党的政治议程。
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.
后首先淡化冠状病毒的威胁,然后指责民主党人炒作它伤害总统特朗普,然后声称的“治愈”关闭经济可能比疾病,福克斯新闻的主机现在似乎一套新的逐客令之后在讨论致命的病原体:质疑,很多人都是真的死于它。
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话题——冠状病毒死亡人数可能被夸大了，因为它包括除了covid19之外还有其他健康问题的人——和前几期一样，经不起推敲。
“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.”
周三，美国冠状病毒应对协调员Deborah Birx博士在白宫的冠状病毒工作组新闻发布会上说:“每次我来这里，我们都非常清楚地说明了共病的情况。”这事从起头就知道了。所以这些人会有潜在的疾病，但这种潜在的疾病不会导致他们的急性死亡，当它与急性感染有关时。”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, also made a point to weigh in, cautioning against such “conspiracy theories.”
美国顶级传染病专家安东尼·福奇(Anthony Fauci)博士也提出了自己的看法，对这种“阴谋论”提出了警告。
“They are nothing but distractions,” Fauci said. “Let somebody write a book about it later on. But not now.”
“它们只是让人分心的东西，”福奇说。“以后让别人写一本关于它的书。但不是现在。”
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，这并没有阻止前福克斯新闻主持人布里特·休姆在周二的塔克·卡尔森的节目中推测，美国的死亡总人数——截至周四，超过14800人，并且还在上升——可能被夸大了。
“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.”
“有很多人没有症状，但他们可能患有其他可怕的疾病，”休谟说。“如果每个人都被自动分类，如果他们被发现有covid19，也就是covid19死亡，我们将会得到非常多的死亡人数，我们可能不会有一个准确的死亡总数。”
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.”
卡尔森对此表示赞同，并补充说，“人们寻求不准确的死亡人数可能是有原因的”，“当记者处理数字时，有时会有一个议程”。
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.
就在这个时候，福克斯新闻主播哈里斯·福克纳周三也加入了这一行列——尽管她是该电视台新闻部门的一员，而不是像卡尔森那样的观点主持人，也不是像休谟那样的分析师。
“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.”
福克纳在播放Birx确认“如果有人死于covid19，我们就把它算作covid19死亡”的片段之前说，“联邦政府现在将所有covid19患者的死亡分类，不管是否有其他潜在的健康问题是一个因素。”
“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，这些人中有多少人在游戏中有其他健康风险，也许不是COVID-19导致了他们的死亡?””福克纳问道。
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.
尽管福克斯皱着眉头，福克纳的问题并不难回答。据实际的专家说，如果COVID-19的死亡人数有什么问题的话，那不是因为它太高了。
It’s that it’s too low.
而是太低了。
Fox News’s Harris Faulkner. (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
福克斯新闻的哈里斯·福克纳。(罗伊Rochlin /盖蒂图片社)
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，尽管福克斯电视台的报道含沙射影，但媒体和政府对冠状病毒死亡的统计方式并没有什么不同寻常之处。在任何危机中——无论是大流行还是飓风——具有先前存在条件的人将会死亡。将此类死亡归咎于当前危机的标准是，确定即使当前危机从未发生，这些人也会不会死。
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.
当谈到冠状病毒时，数据很清楚:如果你的系统已经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更有可能杀死你。但这并不意味着有这些健康问题的病人会在本周(或上周，或下个月)死亡，无论发生什么。他们中的绝大多数可能不会。COVID-19是催化剂——是他们现在而不是以后死去的原因。
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.
考虑到人群中可能存在大量的无症状病例，就像休谟所说的那样，可能有一些人从未因冠状病毒而患病，但检测结果呈阳性，然后死于另一种潜在原因，这些人被错误地统计为covid19死亡。但这个数字可能微乎其微，原因很简单:没有感到不舒服的人没有接受检测。
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.
更多的人没有接受检查，即使他们已经经历了症状。这就是为什么，福克斯新闻，专家说冠状病毒死亡人数几乎肯定是被低估了。正如Birx所指出的那样，美国疾病控制与预防中心只统计了经检测证实存在冠状病毒的死亡人数。但正如《纽约时报》(New York Times)周日报道的那样，“协议不一致、资源有限，以及各州或县之间的决策拼凑”，使得检测每一例可能的冠状病毒死亡病例成为不可能。2月和3月初出现类似流感症状的患者没有接受检测。农村地区的受害者仍然没有接受检测，因为那里的验尸官说他们没有检测这种疾病所需的工具。那些死在家中或负担过重的养老院的受害者没有接受检测。
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.”
与此同时，据《华盛顿邮报》(the Washington Post)上周末报道，“全国各地的验尸官对死者进行尸检的做法差异很大，一些官员表示，对死者进行尸检是对稀缺资源的滥用，而这些稀缺资源本可以用于生者。”“此外，专家说，有些人的病毒检测呈阴性。”
“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.”
流行病学家Marc-Alain Widdowson在接受《华盛顿邮报》采访时表示:“你不能仅仅依靠实验室确诊的病例。”他去年离开CDC，现在担任比利时安特卫普热带医学研究所所长。“你永远不可能把这个测试应用到每个生病和死去的人身上。毫无疑问，全球死亡人数被低估了。”
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.
在对数据争论进行裁决时，有必要检查双方的数据来源。以《纽约时报》、《华盛顿邮报》和其他主流新闻媒体为例，这些消息来源包括“医院官员、医生、公共卫生专家和医学检查人员”。另一方面，福克斯新闻的消息来源似乎是拉什·林堡和马克·莱文等右翼媒体人物。“这个星球上每天都有人死亡，”林堡在4月2日关于“大量猜测”的节目中说，病毒患者可能实际上“死于其他原因”;莱文认为，“心力衰竭、心脏病、心脏病发作”可能是导致报告中19例死亡病例的“夸大”和“严重误导”的原因。
“I have suspected this for weeks,” Levin crowed Tuesday on Twitter.
“我已经怀疑了几个星期了，”莱文周二在Twitter上得意地说道。
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，当福克纳周三问她的小组，共病是否导致了covid19死亡人数的增加时，福克斯新闻(Fox News)的医学撰稿人珍妮特·内舍瓦特(Janette Nesheiwat)博士说，“我不认为最终的数据会有很大的差异。”
A day earlier, even Trump himself described the death count as “very, very accurate.”
一天前，就连特朗普自己也称死亡人数“非常非常准确”。
“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.”
川普说:“当你说死亡有价值时，我认为他们在死亡的价值上是相当准确的。”“我认为，死亡人数非常非常准确。”
Cover thumbnail photo: Alex Brandon/AP, Roy Rochlin/Getty Images封面缩略图:亚历克斯·布兰登/美联社，罗伊·罗克林/盖蒂图片社
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