“They initially declared 4,000 children ages 5-11 had died from a COVID related illness. But in reality that was the number of children diagnosed.”
The New York Times issued a correction Thursday (May 19) after falsely reporting the number of children who have died from a COVID-related condition in a piece about the CDC recommending a third dose of the vaccine to kids.
The piece by Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli initially declared that “record numbers of children were hospitalized during the Omicron surge this winter. Nearly 4,000 children aged 5 to 11 have died from a Covid-related condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome during the pandemic.”
The newspaper eventually issued a correction noting the children were diagnosed, not deceased.
“An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the numbers of children aged 5 to 11 with multisystem inflammatory syndrome. About 4,000 have been diagnosed, not died, with the syndrome,” the paper wrote beneath the updated report.
Last year, the Times issued a massive correction after severely misreporting the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations among children in the US in a report also written by Mandavilli. The Times initially reported “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized” with COVID since the pandemic began, when the factual data in eventually-corrected version was that “more than 63,000 children were hospitalized with COVID-19 from August 2020 to October 2021.”
