Associated Press: Official data now 'unreliable': Commentary
According to the Associated Press, “The Omicron wave is making a mess of the usual statistics.” “It’s just a data disaster,” said one staff writer, with case counts “soaring,” “skyrocketing,” and described as an “explosion” or a “tidal wave.”
The subscript is the reason for the skyrocketing, namely the failure of COVID vaccines. And the consequence of that subscript should possibly not surprise any longer; by now, we should be accustomed to the hypocrisy and double standards, to the extent that the AP states it openly: The soaring cases are “forcing news organizations to rethink the way they report such figures.”
In case that wasn’t clear enough, the article stresses: “The Associated Press has recently told its editors and reporters to avoid emphasizing case counts.” Why? Because claims of record numbers of cases are somehow “unreliable.”
That was the reason why, the article relates, an NBC News story used a one-week average of case counts; CNN flashed two-week averages on screen while covering a Senate hearing on health issues; MSNBC used “a variety of measurements,” and so forth.
“We definitely wanted people to go a little deeper and be more specific in reporting,” an AP news editor is quoted as saying, in reference to stressing hospitalization rates rather than case rates. Apparently, “it’s how journalism works.” Yes, in the COVID era, that is certainly true.
And suddenly, AP has discovered that “there are people being admitted for other reasons [than COVID who] are surprised to find that they test positive.” As if they never knew that car crash victims, cancer victims, even suicides, were being listed as COVID deaths in the early months of the pandemic. “We’ve been surprised again and again,” said one AP writer. “We don’t know everything about the course of the pandemic. We still need to be humble and keep an open mind in terms of where things are going.”
