Harry Shannon
You have no doubt heard of the far-right web site Breitbart. It makes Fox News look timid and centrist. As for accuracy … um, consider this.
On March 17, 2020, they published a story about coronavirus. Well, they published a lot of stories on the topic, but one headline caught my eye.
It read: ‘Study: 86 percent infected with coronavirus in public are undetected.’ That was reasonably accurate – I’ll get back to it.
Then the first sentence in the story, written by Penny Starr, read:
‘A study released on Monday from the journal Science shows that a shocking 86 percent of people in public settings could have “stealth” cases of the coronavirus, showing no symptoms but infecting others.’
Huh?? The headline says that of people out in public who have the coronavirus, about 6 out of seven (86%) are undetected. But the story itself states that among everyone in public, 6 out of 7 have the infection.
And you wonder how conspiracy theories start. (Try looking at the public comments on the article. Well, maybe don’t, you’ll despair about the intelligence of the commenters.)
Let’s go back to the headline. One obvious question is what does ‘undetected’ mean. I went to the report in Science – and to be fair the Breitbart story provided a hotlink to it. It was based on Chinese data before the travel restrictions of 23 January. The researchers divided infections into two groups: ‘(i) documented infected individuals with symptoms severe enough to be confirmed, i.e., observed infections; and (ii) undocumented infected individuals.’ The concern was that many new infections were being caused by contact with the second group, the undocumented infected people. And the study estimated that about 4 in 5 of documented infections came from undocumented infections.
The problem with Breitbart’s headline is that it assumes that all the undocumented infectious people will be out in public. But that’s a leap. Based on the definitions used by the researchers, a fair number of the undocumented were likely sick enough to stay home, but not get tested for the virus. Still, the headline wasn’t nearly as badly wrong as the story.
So when I discovered that Breitbart lists ‘awards’ each year for fake news, the words pot and kettle came to mind very quickly.