US Didn't Cut COVID-19 Death Count in Half

There are too many sub-issues within this issue to tackle at once, but one thing we know for sure is that official death count statistics have not been revised significantly besides the fact that they are increasing with time.

The tweet in question links to the CDC’s ‘Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease’ page, which displays virus death totals by week and state. As of May 1, 2020, that page reported that the COVID deaths total in the U.S. was 37,308. However, that page also signals that the data it displays are an average of 1–2 weeks behind the present day.

At that time, 37,308 was the official death total and had not been revised. Rather, it only might have seemed to have been revised because the social media posts in question mistakenly compared this official death toll to a different page of the CDC, the ‘COVID-19 Cases in the US’ page, which as of May 3, 2020, displayed a total of 65,735 deaths.

The two pages have such a large discrepancy because the latter page is updated daily and includes “both confirmed and probable deaths.” Indeed, two weeks earlier, the latter page had displayed a total of 35,443 deaths, a number much closer to the 37,308 figure reported today by the “Provisional Death Counts” with its 1-2 week data lag.

As of early May 2020, current and projected COVID death toll is approximately the same as that of a particularly bad flu season, and the CDC counts COVID deaths according to who dies with the virus, rather than who dies from the virus, but the death count has never been revised and there appears to be no conspiracy to inflate death counts using this method.