No, the CDC Has Not “Quietly Updated” COVID-19 Death Estimates

An online conspiracy theory retweeted by President Donald Trump misconstrued data regarding the number of people who have died from the coronavirus.

Written byAmanda Heidt

| 3 min read

COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, pandemic, coronavirus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conspiracy, QAnon, Twitter, Facebook, Donald Trump, social media, death certificate, statistics, National Center for Health Statistics

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The phrase “only 6%” trended on Twitter over the weekend after a series of posts accused the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of quietly reducing the number of deaths due to COVID-19 from nearly 154,000 to a little more than 9,200, or 6 percent of that initial total.

Several of the posts, which were widely shared across social media networks before being taken down for violating platform policies, were linked to followers of the QAnon conspiracy group. President Donald Trump retweeted at least two, and his senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis linked to an article from the fringe site Gateway Pundit that remains live, The Hill reports.

The first mentions seem to have come from an August 29 Facebook post, according to VineSight, an organization that uses artificial intelligence to identify misinformation on the web. That post claimed the Centers for Disease Control and ...

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Meet the Author

Amanda Heidt
Amanda first began dabbling in scicom as a master’s student studying marine science at Moss Landing Marine Labs, where she edited the student blog and interned at a local NPR station. She enjoyed that process of demystifying science so much that after receiving her degree in 2019, she went straight into a second master’s program in science communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Formerly an intern at The Scientist, Amanda joined the team as a staff reporter and editor in 2021 and oversaw the publication’s internship program, assigned and edited the Foundations, Scientist to Watch, and Short Lit columns, and contributed original reporting across the publication. Amanda’s stories often focus on issues of equity and representation in academia, and she brings this same commitment to DEI to the Science Writers Association of the Rocky Mountains and to the board of the National Association of Science Writers, which she has served on since 2022. She is currently based in the outdoor playground that is Moab, Utah. Read more of her work at www.amandaheidt.com.
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