The mass hysteria over COVID-19 in the U.S. is driven in large measure by misleading statistics and bad math about the disease’s body count.

Now that New York has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, we are now regularly inundated on cable TV news with the latest pandemic statistics from the city. The statistics grow gloomier by the hour.

These figures have frightened people into submission as state and local governments across America enact repressive measures they say are necessary to contain the virus or slow its proliferation.

After doing everything in their power to oust President Donald Trump, journalists and others are now calling him a weakling for supposedly not doing enough, while they demand an unprecedented nationwide crackdown.

The problem starts with the fact that the highly influential statistics from the Big Apple paint a false picture of what is actually happening.

In New York City, the death of anyone who dies who tests positive for COVID-19 is counted as a coronavirus death. This is the case even if the coronavirus failed to play a significant role in the person’s passing or illness.

This calculus violates established scientific standards.

Brit Hume of Fox News read about New York City’s unscientific methods in a Twitter thread initiated by a thoughtful user named Adam Townsend (@adamscrabble).

Hume tweeted April 1: “Very informative thread. Explains why NY’s Covid 19 fatality numbers are inflated. They don’t distinguish between those who die with the disease and those who die from it.”

A medical doctor once explained this critical distinction to me.

Arguing against ordering excessive tests for his patients, he said that plenty of old people die who have cancer present in their bodies. Sometimes they don’t even know the cancer is present because the growth is tiny and slow-growing and doesn’t affect them. As they age, they die of some other cause even though they do in fact have cancer. When they die, it is not counted as a cancer-caused death because the cancer cannot be said to have killed them.

New York City’s government isn’t the only one worldwide doing this.

In an open letter to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, wrote:

"[T]he mistake is being made worldwide to report virus-related deaths as soon as it is established that the virus was present at the time of death – regardless of other factors. This violates a basic principle of infectiology: only when it is certain that an agent has played a significant role in the disease or death may a diagnosis be made.”

Infectiology, also known as infectology, is “a branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis, management and treatment of various infectious or contagious diseases,” according to Medihub.

Why do the rules of infectiology not apply to the Chinese virus?

Matthew Vadum is an independent investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. and author of Team Jihad: How Sharia-Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy the United States and Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of public domain images from Pixabay