Two Truths.

I've been writing about the costs of having two truths for a while, but it has never been to stark and so dire as the wildly different reports today about the death toll in American because of Covid-19. See what I mean here:

From Rush Limbaugh:

The Models Used to Shut Down America Were Way Off

One of the big news stories of the day that actually can be traced back to yesterday is the projections that our government experts used to shut down the country have turned out to be way off. It’s exactly as I feared, exactly as I warned. The models, we’re told, have turned out to be way off. They overpredicted death. They overpredicted cases. And they overpredicted hospitalization. 

And from The New York Times:

Official Counts Underestimate the U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll

With no uniform system for reporting coronavirus-related deaths in the United States, and a continued shortage of tests, some states and counties have improvised, obfuscated and, at times, backtracked in counting the dead.

“We definitely think there are deaths that we have not accounted for,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, which studies global health threats and is closely tracking the coronavirus pandemic.