File this one under “Better late than never.”
The Associated Press has instructed its reporters and editors to stop emphasizing COVID-19 “case counts” in its coverage of the pandemic.
var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ “div”: “Brid_42037776”, “obj”: {“id”:”27789″,”width”:”16″,”height”:”9″,”video”:”939461″} });
This is good, if far too late. Many of us have said since 2020 that “case counts” is an unreliable metric whose inclusion in news reports serves mostly to cause unnecessary panic. Unlike “hospitalizations” and “deaths,” “case counts” don’t really tell us much about the state of the pandemic.
But forgive me if I am annoyed it took the news wire this long to come to this decision.
The AP explained its thinking Wednesday in a report titled “Omicron wave prompts media to rethink which data to report.”
“For two years, coronavirus case counts and hospitalizations have been widely used barometers of the pandemic’s march across the world,” the report reads. “But the omicron wave is making a mess of the usual statistics, forcing news organizations to rethink the way they report such figures.”
The report adds, “The number of case counts soared over the holidays, an expected development given the emergence of a variant more transmissible than its predecessors. Yet these counts only reflect what is reported by health authorities. They do not include most people who test themselves at home, or are infected without even knowing about it. Holidays and weekends also lead to lags in reported cases.”
If one attempted the impossible, adding up all those separate, disjointed, and unreliable figures, the supposed number of case counts would likely be much higher than what is being reported by public health agencies.
“For that reason, the Associated Press has recently told its editors and reporters to avoid emphasizing case counts in stories about the disease,” the news wire explained. “That means, for example, no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable.”
AP news editor Josh Hoffner said, “We definitely wanted people to go a little deeper and be more specific in reporting.”
The report continues, explaining “hospitalizations” and “deaths” are likely more reliable and meaningful figures.
Yes, we know. Some of us, including FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, have been saying this since 2020. Many of us also noted at the time that, as the AP and other media outlets now concede, the “hospitalizations” figure includes people who were admitted with COVID-19, not because of COVID-19. So even this metric ought to be taken with some grain of salt.
Again, one can’t ding the AP for instructing its reporters (finally) to stop emphasizing case counts. But one can’t help but ask: What took them so long?
