FACT CHECK
Newspapers get muddled over Covid-19
We’ve recently spotted two examples of newspapers misreporting studies and numbers around Covid-19.
An article in the print edition of Monday’s Daily Express says in its first line: “Pregnant women are 22 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than other women.”
But what the study actually found was that pregnant women with Covid-19 were 22 times more likely to die than pregnant women who didn’t have Covid. And due to the small numbers involved, this figure is highly uncertain.
Elsewhere, several newspaper articles greatly overstated the danger of the so-called “Nigerian variant” of Covid (officially known as B1.525).
Kent Live (the online site for the local newspaper) reported that this strain kills “twice as many people” as other variants, claiming that it has “so far” killed 4.3% of the people it has infected.
But this is misleading, because we don’t know the true number of people so far infected by it.
These death rates are also based on the number of deaths occurring among known cases. At the time the article was published, there had only been 328 cases of the “Nigerian variant” in the UK, so we can’t really be confident about how deadly it is.
Public Health England (PHE) said in February there was “no evidence that this variant causes more severe illness or increased transmissibility.”
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