Skeptic magazine publisher and “Science Salon” podcast host Dr. Michael Shermer has been crunching the COVID19 numbers, and what he’s found will shock you:

Apply Italy's 24,747 cases/1,809 deaths = 0.07309 to the United States 330,430,597 citizens = 24,151,172 dead.

Even if that's an order of magnitude too high, lop off a 0 = 2,415,117 dead Americans. That's serious. — Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) March 16, 2020

Serious? It’s downright scary.

Scary that someone with nearly 180,000 Twitter followers is peddling terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad math.

Is this an example of something people should be skeptical of? — Remy LXVII ??? (@guywhits) March 16, 2020

Extremely. Shermer is attempting to compare apples to oranges here. Unless the entire population of Italy has COVID19, the number of COVID19 cases in Italy is … not comparable to the population of the United States. Shermer’s talking about two different things. Moreover, the demographics of Italy’s population are not the same as those of the United States. A significant percentage of Italy’s population is over 65. That matters.

Math matters.

Wow, that's not how this works……. — Brian Powell (@BrianPowell81) March 16, 2020

That’s not how it works Michael. Stop — Radical Liberalist (@RadcalLibralist) March 16, 2020

For someone who claims to be reasoned and a skeptic, this post is neither. It is basic fear mongering and exaggeration. You sound a lot like the pseudoscience you criticize. — Matt Grawitch (@DocGrawitch) March 16, 2020

It’s not 100 percent of the country! — Mark Coffey (@txsinatrafan) March 16, 2020

Your math assumes that every single person in America would catch the virus. — Todd Nannie (@toddna) March 16, 2020

That's a faulty comparison. Why calculate cases/death for Italy, and used that number to derive citizens/death ratio for US?

It ought to be cases/death for Italy and cases/death for United States. — Herb da Hegelian (@HerbertHitchens) March 16, 2020

Wow, these have been some very bad few weeks for math — MrTate (@MrTate) March 16, 2020

What is this thing with leftists and inability to math? Delete this tweet. https://t.co/bGEIavTabe — Oh THAT Guy (@NathanWurtzel) March 16, 2020

There appears to be an epidemic of mathematical illiteracy on the Left.

Terrible tweet. Pls delete — Eric Michael (@SSG_obvious) March 16, 2020

But hey:

We can give a million dollars to every American and still have money left over — Steven Willcox (@StevenWillcox2) March 16, 2020

So at least there’s that.