An Instagram post imploring readers to use “simple math” asserts that U.S. deaths from COVID-19 are vastly overcounted.
The viral post says the number of estimated annual COVID-19 deaths in the United States is 27,530. That’s a long way away from the 385,460 people who the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says died from COVID-19 in 2020 and the 453,707 who died in 2021.
The premise of the post is that a more factual number of deaths would subtract those who died “with COVID, not from,” those who didn’t die in nursing homes and those who didn’t have four or more comorbidities.
“It’s just simple math,” the caption says. “Even with these inflated numbers, is 28k deaths a year worth what we are doing (to) society and peoples lives? This is insane.”
But in this case, the post itself just doesn’t add up.
It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
Two of the post’s main premises — that the overall COVID-19 death count is inflated by people who died “with” rather than “from” the virus, and that 75% of COVID-19 deaths occurred in people with four or more comorbidities — have been previously debunked.
And though nursing home residents are an already-vulnerable population, studies showed that their risk of dying increased during the pandemic.
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