Apoorva Mandavilli keeps making mistakes at the New York Times to exaggerate the risk of COVID to keep Americans scared

This is not journalism but activism

Apoorva Mandavilli is hell bent on keeping Americans scared of COVID even if that means publishing falsehoods. Here is the latest.

She can’t even report the number of Americans who died WITH covid per week accurately. In a prior essay, I detail her COVID errors and show that these are one-sided. She tends to fear-monger about the virus. See those e.g. here.

It isn’t just factual errors. Even the framing of her recent article is biased.

This week the CDC considered removing the 5 day requirement for isolation post COVID. A curious reporter might ask, “Hmmm, among all people who had covid this last month, what % tested for COVID, and what % of those isolated for 5 days?”

Were people even following the CDCs policy?

If the answer is no one is testing and no one is isolating, then the policy change is negligible— as no one was doing it anyway. That’s not what we got.

Instead the New York Times, Apoorva Mandavilli believes COVID remains a big threat, and her article is entirely critical of the proposed rule change. She laments the proposed policy change and cites a willing band of selective quotes, but she doesn’t actually provide data.

She can’t even ask the first question: was anyone following the policy to begin with.

When she does provide statistics, she gets is horrifically wrong. How is this acceptable? Let’s not forget her other comments. She refused to take lab leak seriously, and condemned it as racist.

She was wrong about hospitalizations

She was wrong about diagnosis vs deaths

And of course, she is so biased she got school closure wrong and her reporting contributed to massive harm to generation of kids.

A decent NY Times would relieve her of duty.