From the Editor: Whom do we believe about COVID?

Has it been debunked, or is it just bunk?
Is it hoax-proof, or proof of a hoax?
Six months after the first big COVID-19 restrictions were placed on Louisiana’s economy, and on the actions of private individuals, too, we’ve managed to divide ourselves into two camps. One side accepts the view that the coronavirus has spread widely and has killed hundreds of thousands. The other that believes that officials have exaggerated the spread and effects, if it’s a serious threat at all.
You don’t have to poke around much on social media to find people on both sides. And that’s a big wedge on an issue that is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. More than 200,000 people are now reported to have died from COVID-related causes in the United States, more than 5,200 of them in Louisiana, and 161 of them in the three parishes in which this newspaper circulates.
That’s not counting the $3 trillion the federal government has already borrowed to keep the economy above water, or the hundreds of thousands that local governments stand to lose if the Louisiana legislative auditor has figured correctly.
So whom do you believe?
A couple of recent incidents illustrate the split.
One of them came out of Red River and DeSoto parishes in July. Officials went on social media to assert that they had proof that the Louisiana coronavirus case count was inflated.
They point to information provided by the Department of Health to the parish governments in which the same person was listed more than once as having tested positive for COVID. The 96 cases reported by the state in Red River, for example, should have been reported as 58, the officials said.
But the Department of Health had an explanation.
At a press conference, Assistant Secretary Alex Billioux said the state was providing lists of COVID-positive people to parish emergency preparedness offices so first responders could take precautions if they were to come into contact with the patients.
The information was based on recent testing and was not intended to represent the number of cases in the parish, Billioux said. The state case count reported on the Office of Public Health dashboard each day is continuously monitored to weed out duplicates, he said.
Dr. Martha Whyte, the medical director for Red River’s Department of Health region, put it more succinctly: “It is correct on the state dashboard. Period.”
There is some room for skepticism here. Thirty-eight duplicates — the difference between the 96 cases reported by the state and the 58 claimed by the Red River officials — seems like an awful lot.
But Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera was quoted by The Associated Press as saying the state statistics reported on the dashboard are “generally correct.”
The other controversy came in mid-August, when the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that just 6% of the nation’s COVID-related deaths were attributed directly to the coronavirus on death certificates.
This fit nicely into the denier narrative that says hospitals and public health officials are reporting deaths from accidents or other causes as COVID-related because they get more government money for treating coronavirus patients, or they’re trying to prevent President Donald Trump’s reelection, or something.
I had a couple of reactions to this news. The first one was, “This is news?”
Since the pandemic emerged in Louisiana, public health officials have been linking COVID deaths to underlying health conditions. The $2 medical word is “comorbidities.”
You can go to the OPH dashboard today and learn quickly that 53% of people listed as COVID fatalities had high blood pressure, 31% had diabetes, 20% had heart disease, 17% were obese, and on down the list.
That’s how COVID seems to work. It picks on people who already have medical conditions. That doesn’t mean COVID-19 isn’t dangerous.
The other reaction was to remember the huge database of Louisiana deaths I obtained 23 years ago, when I was taking a course in computer-assisted reporting.
The database contained a record for everyone who died in Louisiana 1990-95. The names and addresses were redacted, but the parish of residence and cause of death were listed. The idea was to look for patterns that might point to particular risk for local people.
And boom, there it was: lots of deaths from brain cancer, more than you’d think was possible. I thought I was on to something.
But, as is often the case, reporting fouled up a good story. Presented with the findings, doctors told me that many of those people actually had another form of cancer that spread to the brain. The immediate cause of death may have been a brain tumor, but the real villain was lung cancer, liver cancer or some other form.
Physicians seem to have some room for individual expression when it comes to listing the cause of death on death certificates.
We know that flu fatalities often die of pneumonia. Before effective treatment was available, AIDS patients didn’t die of AIDS. They died from forms of pneumonia or cancer that barely exist outside people who are HIV-positive.
But flu kills people. And AIDS kills people.
It’s clear now that COVID-19 kills people, too.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.