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The president’s preferred method of communicating with the public has been shown to be Twitter. However in recent months, the social media site has drawn the president’s ire.
On occasion, they flag or outright remove tweets containing misleading information. In fact, on Sunday, Twitter did just that. In fact, the tweet is so thoroughly scrubbed from Twitter that you would need to use backup cloud storage to see a cached version of it.
Donald Trump retweeted a message from a Twitter user named “Mel Q,” an account that seems to be a follower of QAnon. QAnon is an extremist conspiracy theory group that primarily promotes its views on Twitter. The tweet, which Trump retweeted on Sunday, including a claim by Mel Q that only six percent of COVID-19 deaths recorded were actually from COVID-19.
Mel Q’s tweet was a screenshot of a Pinterest post, ironically enough. It claimed that only 9,210 people have “actually” died from COVID-19. The post cites a CDC report, though it is misquoted. The post holds that only six percent of people who died from COVID-19 had no other conditions.
This tweet, as Donald Trump retweeted it, was rather misleading. Here’s what the CDC actually stated: “Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”
As for those other causes, they’re largely rather consistent with the ways a respiratory illness kills its victims. Conditions like respiratory distress syndrome, respiratory failure, adult pneumonia, and respiratory arrest were all included alongside most COVID-19 deaths. These things are commonly the actual acting factor in a patient’s death, not the disease itself.
For some actual good news regarding the pandemic, the US is finally seeing case numbers fall in some areas. Experts are citing widespread use of masks, stricter adherence to social distancing, and lifestyle changes by older Americans as reasons why.
Notably, most new cases in the past month have been among younger Americans. This has had a knock-on effect of the death toll falling substantially.
While the US is far from out of the woods on COVID, it seems like things are under better control than they were two months ago. Many people are now patiently waiting for a vaccine for the virus to help deliver it a knockout blow. In the meantime, COVID-19 has killed over 180,000 in the US alone.
