The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US has revised its data to reduce paediatric deaths from Covid-19 by nearly 24%. The national public health agency of the United States said last Tuesday that 1,755 Americans under the age of 18 had died from Covid-19 since the pandemic started in spring 2020. However, it has now reduced that figure, and is reporting 1,341 deaths in that category.
The CDC blamed the inflation of deaths on a “coding logic error” in a footnote on the agency’s Covid data tracker on the 15th March. Paediatric death counts were not the only ones to be lowered – with total deaths from COVID being reduced by roughly 70,000.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the CDC, said: “An adjustment was made to COVID Data Tracker’s mortality data on March 14 involving the removal of 72,277 — including 416 paediatric deaths — deaths previously reported across 26 states because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”
She added: “Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported.”
The CDC’s weekly provisional data states that 921 children have died for reasons “involving COVID-19,” which is an even lower number than the official data tracker now presents. The provisional data reported by the CDC usually lags by some period of time.
In the US, children make up less than 0.1% of total Covid deaths, according to CDC data. The mortality rate for children (vaccinated and unvaccinated) remains lower than for vaccinated older adults according to CDC data.
This is not the first time the CDC has been criticised. In February, the agency faced backlash for its data reporting after the New York Times carried a report stating that a large portion of the data being collected by the agency relating to Covid-19 was not being made available to the public.
Last month, Gript’s John McGuirk called out the Irish Examiner for claiming that children’s hospitalisations with Covid were “soaring”, stating it was a “remarkably misleading” statement. The reporting, Mr McGuirk said, “frightened parents on the basis of weeks old data, interpreted in the most alarming light” to justify a headline about children’s “soaring” Covid hospitalisations that simply was not true.
“It is also important to note that vanishingly few children with covid get seriously ill, and the chances of death at that age are infinitely small,” he added.
In November, HSE data revealed that zero children under the age of 12 in Ireland have died of Covid-19