I'm not familiar with the fact checker Lead Stories and was curious what else they publish. I went to their Twitter feed [1] and something caught my eye, a story about the mortality of COVID vs the Spanish Flu [2]. The headline posted on Twitter was "Fact Check: COVID-19 IS Deadlier Than The Spanish Flu And Seasonal Flu" [3].
That headline shocked me, because if you follow the mortality statistics, there is no way COVID's worldwide mortality rate could draw anywhere near the mortality rate of the 1918 flu epidemic, which has been estimated at 1-6% of the entire world population (17-100 million deaths, world pop in 1918 approximately 1.8 billion) [4, 5]. COVID has been estimated at about 7 million deaths so far out of a world population of 7.9 billion [6], for a global mortality rate of around 0.1%. Even looking at total excess deaths, which includes a lot of non-COVID causes, you have 20 million, still at the lower end of the 1918 epidemic's range with a much larger world population [7].
Lead Stories eventually defends their claim by comparing Spanish Flu mortality to peak COVID mortality in New York during the early epidemic - a bizarre case of cherry-picking.
To their credit, Lead Stories did update their headline soon after tweeting that to remove the claim about Spanish Flu, but the lead sentence still reads as follows:
> Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading...
This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading.
Considering this and their significant failures in the BMJ incident, I would hesitate in trusting this fact checker to consistently provide high-quality, unbiased checks.
Entire fact-checking thing is just the media under disguise, so click-baity articles are to be expected. They often try to present their claims as if the subject they write about is entirely false, even when it isn't. Moreover, it's not only that they are not qualified to write on most topics they write about: all fact-checking studios act under guidelines of IFCN, the "International Fact-Checking Network", so it doesn't matter whether cases like these happen on Facebook or Twitter, they are governed by the same entity that is likely to pursue its own political interests and bias.
One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
I have no opinion on the merits of the chosen comparison, but if your position is that it is fair to compare the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic that occurred right after a devastating world war with the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic under 21st-century health care and information systems, then I would also accuse you of cherry-picking your statistics: you need to include both the differences in healthcare and the differences in case numbers in your comparison.
I didn't say what is fair, so please don't bother making such insinuations. Let qualified researchers decide that. I simply pointed out the flaws in the comparison made by Lead Stories and how they used it to justify a misleading claim.
The article made an extremely specific comparison - all-time Spanish Flu toll versus COVID toll in a very specific time and place where it was especially bad - did not justify it, and used it to imply a broader claim about the relative deadliness of the pandemics. And the broader claim was explicit before they changed the headline.
I reject the idea that the appropriate comparison is subjective in this context of fact-checking. Lead Stories cannot freely make whatever comparison it feels justified and present the result as a fact about the relative deadliness of the 1918 and COVID pandemics. The most relevant facts prima facie are those presented in my initial post. If someone wishes to argue that COVID is more deadly after controlling for XYZ, the proper forum for that is a peer-reviewed scholarly research article.
> One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
Is it though?
I get that if you're talking about how much money something cost in 1918 and how much it cost today you'd want to take inflation into account otherwise everything in 1918 is "free" (or 90%+ discounted) compared to today.
But when you're talking about lives and deaths, well, I mean I don't think a life back then is worth any more or less than a life today. On a population adjusted basis a single death "counts" more insofar as there were fewer people around so a death is a larger percentage of the world population. But it doesn't inherently have less value.
That headline shocked me, because if you follow the mortality statistics, there is no way COVID's worldwide mortality rate could draw anywhere near the mortality rate of the 1918 flu epidemic, which has been estimated at 1-6% of the entire world population (17-100 million deaths, world pop in 1918 approximately 1.8 billion) [4, 5]. COVID has been estimated at about 7 million deaths so far out of a world population of 7.9 billion [6], for a global mortality rate of around 0.1%. Even looking at total excess deaths, which includes a lot of non-COVID causes, you have 20 million, still at the lower end of the 1918 epidemic's range with a much larger world population [7].
Lead Stories eventually defends their claim by comparing Spanish Flu mortality to peak COVID mortality in New York during the early epidemic - a bizarre case of cherry-picking.
To their credit, Lead Stories did update their headline soon after tweeting that to remove the claim about Spanish Flu, but the lead sentence still reads as follows:
> Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading...
This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading.
Considering this and their significant failures in the BMJ incident, I would hesitate in trusting this fact checker to consistently provide high-quality, unbiased checks.
[1] https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom
[2] https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-...
[3] https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/148358521874124800...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
[6] https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-...
[7] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid