Defying apocalyptic predictions, Colorado was not particularly hard-hit by the Coronavirus. The number of cases and deaths per capita were in the middling part of the U.S. range.

Moreover, in Colorado the virus is nearly dead now. A website set up by the state showing virus data over time shows this:

It can be seen that the daily death toll follows the classic bell-shaped curve that epidemiologists learn in med school. If anything, it’s better than one might hope for, in that the decline in right-hand part of the curve is steeper than the increase in the left-hand part. Yesterday, the death toll was zero.

One might think that the state’s largest newspaper would see this as news. They don’t.

Yesterday’s Denver Post reported that the death counts were being revised to account for some reclassification of deaths over the last month. And they reported the overall totals in state deaths. And they reported on some other odds and ends, mostly focusing on the overall numbers while completely ignoring the trends.

They didn’t report at all the information shown in this state graph. They didn’t report or even allude to the dramatic decline in virus deaths.

The New York Times is even worse. Their website showing daily deaths in Colorado contains this graph:

That’s dramatically different than the state graph reproduced above. While the state graph – the simple and accurate one – shows the virus peaking and declining to zero, the NYT graph shows no peak, and even a gradual rise to the present.

Note: Some Colorado deaths were originally classified as non-COVID, and were later reclassified as COVID. The NYT graph evidently presents those reclassified deaths as light grey bars, while presenting the deaths that were classified as COVID all along as dark grey bars. But this does not account for their error. Regardless of how you look at their graph — dark bars alone or dark plus light bars, it simply does not remotely match the trend lines in the state graph.