Bloomberg Cites Non-Peer-Reviewed Data; Gets Burned by CDC Misinformation on Pediatric Deaths Due to COVID-19

A report of more deaths in children from COVID-19 than from influenza ignored the over-reporting "coding error" admitted by CDC. Bloomberg published it anyway.

Bloomberg’s overly dramatic article

Cited a fallacious article on “Inside Medicine Dot Com” scarily entitled “Delta and Omicron killed far more children than flu ever does”.

Both ignore CDC’s massive over-reporting glitch they admitted was due to a “coding error”.

This fact was pointed out by a stay-at-home parent studying surgical technology, Heather Winemiller, who commented:

“Heather Winemiller

In March of this year over 72,000 deaths were removed from Covid death toll, 416 of those were children, in what the CDC described as a “coding logic error.” This changes your narrative and in fact, makes a case that the flu is in fact more deadly in children than Covid ever was. The language used in this article is alarming and not really accurate. At 2 years in, the articles to drum up fear and unrest aren’t working anymore.”

Way to go, Heather.

Another commenter pointed to a British Medical Journal commentary by Jennifer Block confirming the error (See https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o831)

Covid-19: US tracker overestimated deaths among children

BMJ 2022; 376 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o831 (Published 29 March 2022)Cite this as: BMJ 2022;376:o831

“The US’s health protection agency has reduced the number of deaths it is attributing to covid-19 by more than 70 000 after what it referred to as ‘coding logic errors’ were highlighted on social media.

On 15 March the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed 72 277 deaths, including those of 416 children, from its Covid-19 Data Tracker, which has been posting real time data collected from more than two dozen state health departments since April 2020.1”

The original offending article cited data up to Feb 2022, and CDC downgraded and corrected the number in March, 2022.

Tell Bloomberg to retract their article by sharing THIS article on any of Bloomberg’s Twitter posts. Visit https://twitter.com/business