The original creators of both charts agree they’re based on incorrect data. The grad students who made the chart to the left on March 30 deleted it the same day because they did not understand that CDC mortality figures are incomplete long after they’re initially reported. CDC mortality data goes through this process every year, making recent weeks seem less deadly until the death figures are complete.

Updated: CDC pneumonia death figures over time, by Tyler Morgan

The graph to the right seems to show an astounding drop in pneumonia deaths, which truthers imagine occurred to make room for bogus COVID-19 deaths. But this graph was based on data that the CDC marked as incomplete, the author of the chart quickly posted a better version, and more recently made the graph below comparing flu and coronavirus death. It got much less attention on Twitter than the original misleading graph.

Truthers don’t like this version

The original charts fall apart with even a little scrutiny. The last data points on the misleading charts is for week 10 and 11 — corresponding to the weeks ending March 7 and March 14 when there were, respectively, only 19 and 57 COVID-19 deaths in the whole country. To put that in perspective, there were ninety-two Division I college basketball games on March 7, shaping the seeding for the March Madness tournament that nearly everyone expected would kick off in 10 days. It makes no sense that deaths would dramatically drop 12 days before the first stay-at-home order issued in California.

The “drops” are just reporting artifacts. The current figures for these weeks show 51,978 total deaths and 3,203 pneumonia deaths, which would show much flatter lines on both charts. And as Stone observed, these numbers are still incomplete.

The fact that these graphs are misleading has not slowed their spread. Instead, some truthers pushing them have become further disconnected from reality, as when noted conspiratorial grifter Candace Owens declared “death totals have LOWERED in [NYC] since the pandemic. Any media claiming that there are MORE bodies, is lying.”

Owens is wrong: the data she cited was for week 11 ending March 14, when New York City logged its very first COVID-19 death. Preliminary data for week 12 ending March 21 shows that overall deaths rose by 170, which is a larger figure than the number of official COVID-19 deaths that week. (Not content with one falsehood, Owens then tweeted out several more based on her misunderstanding, which are flatly contradicted by more recent data. These errors remain unacknowledged and unretracted.)

On average, about 160 people in New York City die each day, but COVID-19 deaths alone are higher than average total deaths in NYC over the last ten days. Lyman Stone made this point visually with his graph of historical New York state deaths with the figures for COVID-19 superimposed:

The dashed red line is Stone’s estimate for total mortality, but the main point is the black line. In New York, COVID-19 is, as of last week, killing as many people as all causes put together normally do — and the rate of death is still increasing. Additionally, the number of deaths doesn’t fully capture the stress placed on NYC emergency rooms, where admissions for “influenza-like illnesses” such as COVID-19 have literally gone off the charts:

Claim: Anyone who dies is counted as a coronavirus death!

Truthers repeat that “dying with coronavirus is different from dying of coronavirus,” imagining that scores of unrelated cancer and automotive deaths are being chalked up to COVID-19 if they test positive for the disease.

The evidence suggests the reverse is more likely: deaths are being under-counted when they occur outside hospitals. Scores of people are dying at home in New York City at higher rates than city-wide deaths before March, so the COVID-19 death toll appears incomplete.

Conspiracy theorists ignore this and construct a narrative based on alternative facts. Trump superfan Bill Mitchell, for example, insinuated that New York City uses overgenerous criteria for counting COVID-19 deaths, supposedly employing the same misguided method as Italy. To back this up, truthers often quote an Italian doctor, Walter Ricciardi:

The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus. On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity …

But Dr. Ricciardi was not saying that COVID-19 didn’t kill patients with comorbidities. The report itself, which studied a subset of just 355 victims, refers to evaluated “patients who died as a result of COVID-2019 infection.” And for good reason: the most common comorbidity, hypertension (76 percent), is not an acutely fatal condition. Over 100 million Americans have hypertension, and most of them live for decades. And the 88 percent figure Ricciardi mentioned isn’t accurate either. A more comprehensive study of 1591 Italian victims found that only 68 percent of the victims had comorbidities, including 65 percent of the victims under 50 years old.

Truthers and their enablers, like Fox’s Brit Hume, cite comorbidities in NYC as well, proclaiming that 96 percent of COVID-19 moralities had other underlying illnesses. Truthers pretend as if these comorbidities are all things like strokes and late-stage cancer, but here again the “underlying conditions” include hypertension and diabetes, which tens of millions of Americans have.

The truthers have it backwards. Italy and other jurisdictions have most likely underestimated the carnage attributable to COVID-19 due to only counting the deaths at hospitals. As the Economist and others have reported, the raw mortality rate experienced by Italian and Spanish cities is well above the baseline from previous seasons. Or to put it another way, there were more excess deaths in Italy and Spain in March than the number attributed to COVID-19:

The same undercount may be happening here, judging by well-sourced examples reported by the New York Times. Some people who probably died of COVID-19 are going uncounted in states where testing is still scarce and doctors sensibly prefer to save tests for the living.

These undercount examples are anecdotes, but they’re much more credible than the ones truthers spread. Candace Owens may be the most ghoulish and irresponsible truther in this regard. On April 2 she tweeted that musician Adam Schlesinger, a 52-year old COVID-19 victim, was in fact “battling pancreatic cancer for the last 7 months.” Owens deleted the tweet after a Twitter user observed that her claim was not only false, but appeared to be based on a lazy misreading of a Google search result. She has not admitted to or explained the error.

Claim: It’s just the flu (in terms of death rate)!

Many truthers argued that the case fatality rate (CFR, the rate of death due to infection) of the coronavirus is about 0.1–0.2 percent, comparable to the seasonal flu. Some still promote this idea. The theory was more popular several weeks ago based on the observation that Germany had a CFR of only 0.2 percent compared to 1.7 percent in South Korea, 3.5 percent in China, and over 10 percent in Italy. Truthers seized on the idea that this low rate — only double the CFR of bad flu seasons — was the “true” rate and that other countries with higher rates were either dysfunctional (China and Iran) or exaggerating their numbers (Italy).

But German exceptionalism was short-lived. COVID-19 takes several weeks to kill patients, and Germany’s epidemic was too young to reflect many deaths. Its CFR is now in line with South Korea at about 1.6 percent — much more deadly than the flu.

Claim: More die from the flu!

Some truthers incorrectly predicted that fewer Americans would die of COVID-19 than the estimated 12,400 who died from H1N1 (“swine flu”) in 2009–10. Truthers have now moved the goalposts and argue that since seasonal flu sometimes kills 60,000 people, COVID-19 is no big deal.

First, this argument undermines truthers’ claim that COVID-19 deaths are overcounted. In a typical season, only a few thousand death certificates report death by flu, and the CDC extrapolates an estimate based on deaths from related conditions like pneumonia (which is where the 60,000 figure comes from).

More importantly, the seasonal flu is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Barely a month has passed since the first COVID-19 death in America, and it has already killed more than H1N1 did in a year — and it did this while the country has been largely closed to prevent spread of the disease. Left unchecked, the virus appears to be much more dangerous than the flu, as seen in Italy and Spain, which took longer to respond.

Claim: We probably got the coronavirus in January!

Several truthers, such as the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, contend that many people already had coronavirus in January, that it was unnoticed by public health officials, and so now Americans have some herd immunity. But this theory cannot explain how coronavirus deaths in New York have recently overtaken deaths by all other causes combined. If it was widespread months ago, why didn’t deaths spike in January?

J.D. Vance points out that a serological study was recently conducted on 1,000 volunteers in Copenhagen and central Denmark showing that 2.7 percent of the participants had antibodies for SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus’ scientific name). This is much higher than the known incidence of cases in Denmark, but inconsistent with the idea that the disease has been circulating undetected for months. Analysis of genetic mutation further suggests that while COVID-19 was spreading in some parts of America in January, very few people had it then.

Claim: The hospitals are empty!

It’s true that many hospitals are less busy than normal and have mostly-empty parking lots, but that’s because non-essential appointments were cancelled. People who would have once raced to the emergency room are staying away. Some parts of the United States have seen relatively few COVID-19 patients, which is shown in official figures, but caution may still be keeping people away from ERs. As a result, some hospitals are virtually empty. But the suggestion that NYC intensive care units are not slammed is offensively false.

Claim: British scientists revised their doomsday prediction!

A report by scientists from Imperial College in London got international attention for predicting that 2.2 million Americans and 500,000 Britons could die if the coronavirus spread unchecked. After the U.S. and U.K. closed businesses and recommended social distancing, lead author Neil Ferguson told Parliament that he expected around 20,000 to die in the U.K.

Ferguson’s testimony was widely misreported in right-wing media, including by The Federalist’s Sean Davis, as an admission that Imperial College’s original predictions were “bogus.” But as National Review correctly reported, the Imperial College study was not retracted or significantly revised. The original report modeled various scenarios, both with and without countermeasures. It estimated 500,000 deaths in the U.K. with no countermeasures and 20,000 deaths with a national lockdown. Because the U.K. implemented a lockdown, Ferguson referenced the 20,000 figure.

Truthers’ basic, perhaps willful misreading of Ferguson’s testimony highlights the flimsiness of their claims, and how they’ll distort facts to perpetuate them.

Claim: Bill Gates is spreading panic and trying to sabotage chloroquine to sell more vaccines and push mobile 5G installation!

These theories seem nutty, yet well-known truthers, including anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr., spread them. In fact, the non-profit Gates foundation is funding the production of seven vaccine candidates even though Gates knows it’s likely just one of them — and maybe none of them — will yield an approved vaccine. If Gates had wanted to make money, he could have done a lot better shorting the stock market. As for the 5G part of the theory, it doesn’t make sense and appears to be promoted through Russian disinformation.

Ben Garrison’s other recent Bill Gates cartoon is even more unhinged

Claim: The coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon!

Weirdly, both Chinese and American nationalists believe this theory — they just disagree about which government supposedly manufactured it. But it’s not an engineered bioweapon. The virus is previously unknown, but bears close similarity to a bat coronavirus. An engineered disease would have used existing virus components. Billion-dollar drug companies struggle to develop biologics similar to existing proteins, so creating novel viruses is beyond humanity’s technical grasp at this time. The most likely explanation is SARS-CoV-2 jumped from one or more animal species in the zoonotic petri dish of Wuhan’s wet markets.

Defeating coronavirus with truth

There’s some legitimately good news about COVID-19. Social distancing appears to be controlling the outbreak in many states. The rate of hospitalization appears to have plateaued in New York, although the situation in places like Detroit and New Orleans looks grim. We are “flattening the curve,” at least in some locations.

But no one should let incomplete mortality figures or unverified rumors convince them that coronavirus deaths are fake or would have occurred anyway. For most victims, the virus has taken years or even decades of life from them. Hundreds of Adam Schlesinger songs will never be written because a virus cruelly suffocated him at age 52.

We should pull together to defeat the coronavirus. We will do that best when everyone recognizes it as a dangerous threat and behaves accordingly. This ought not be a partisan issue. And to their credit, some Trump-supporting conservatives have fought against COVID-19 misinformation.

Whether the shutdown lasts for months, or we reopen the economy with Singapore-style contact tracing in a few weeks, people should do what they can to avoid spreading the virus. But folks are less likely to slow the spread when they believe COVID-19 is fake. Trutherism puts everyone at risk.

COVID-19 is real and we will defeat it. But in the end we will suffer less if we do it together.