This comes via INDEPENDENT CHRONICLE:
The Texas Tribune published an article on Thursday attributing the total number of children hospitalized since the beginning of the pandemic to a period of the last 7 days, and then quickly backtracking when the fallacy was brought to light – a reporting error of over 5,000 cases.
“That’s one heck of a correction,” reporter Steven Dennis tweeted.
[….]
The Tribune stated that the number of children hospitalized during the past week in Texas was over 5,800, when in fact that is the total number of children hospitalized with Covid since the onset of the pandemic.
“And yet that’s still misleading! He first said 5800 in a 7-day period, then said, sorry, it was 783 in a *40 day* period! But he didn’t actually say 40, so it’s easy to skim and think he’s talking about the same length of time,” tweeted one person.
[….]
The Tribune article discusses how more children are flooding into Texas hospitals than ever before, originally saying that Texas had seen over 5,800 children hospitalized with Covid in the past week.
It turns out that the actual number of children admitted with Covid between July 1 and August 9 – a 40-day period, not a 7-day period as originally stated in the article – in Texas is 783. That gives us about 137 hospitalizations per week if divided evenly between the 40 days. So the number that the Tribune originally reported is 4,100% higher than the correct statistic.
UPDATE
NEWSBUSTERS notes how wide the lie made it:
….So over five weeks there were 783 children, not 5,800 over one week. Brent Scher, executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon, tweeted on the bad math: “I did the math here. The claim: 828 hospitalizations a day Reality: 19 a day. Only off by about 43x.” No wonder Jen Rubin deleted her tweet!
Skeptics pointed out the slippery language of the Tribune correction. Not “hospitalized with COVID,” but “admitted to Texas hospitals with COVID.” So they was no measurement of how serious their admissions were, for how many days they stayed.
Once again, the people who think they represent Science have bungled the actual numbers and massively exaggerated the problem. Creating a viral tweet seems to get ahead of doing basic math.
PS: Rubin wrote an editorial hammering on the same point on the same day that the “MAGA governors” are endangering lives:
The worst perpetrators of this avoidable tragedy are not a few stray crackpots such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.); they are, in fact, among the top contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Not all Republicans are prohibiting mask or vaccine mandates, but all governors who do so — in Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Texas and Utah — are Republican.
This is certainly not a “pro-life” party. Around the country, Americans in large numbers have figured out what these political hacks are up to: sacrificing the health and lives of Americans at the altar of their political ambition.
