Seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, state governments and media outlets continue to publicize confusing, misleading data on the spread of the disease here, perpetuating fears that deaths from the virus are skyrocketing on a daily basis even as those fatalities are generally distributed across a period of days, weeks or even months.
At issue is how state health departments publicize daily reports of fatalities within the state's borders. State health officials have for months been publishing two sets of mortality statistics:
deaths that occurred on the publication date in question, and deaths that have only recently been catalogued from state backlogs.The Arizona Department of Health Services publishes both of those figures on
its coronavirus dashboard: On its "Summary" page, it lists the "number of new deaths reported today," while on its "Covid-19 Deaths" tab, the state lists the actual "deaths by date of death."
The distinction is a critical one: The state's "new deaths" every day do not actually reflect the number of coronavirus fatalities Arizona has logged in the past 24 hours, but rather the number of COVID-19 deaths it has identified
from both new and older death certificates.
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