Letters
Covid-19: death rate in UK hospital patients
Creating misinformation: how a headline in The BMJ about covid-19 spread virally
BMJ 2020; 369 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m2384 (Published 18 June 2020) Cite this as: BMJ 2020;369:m2384
- Maike Winters, doctoral candidate1,
- Ben Oppenheim, vice president of product, policy, and partnerships2,
- Jonas Pick, resident physician internal medicine3,
- Helena Nordenstedt, internal medicine specialist and project coordinator1
- 1Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2Metabiota, San Francisco, CA, USA
- 3Danderyds Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden
- maike.winters{at}ki.se
The spread of the novel coronavirus has been accompanied by a viral spread of misinformation. Misinformation is easily created, as shown by a recent news story in The BMJ about a preprint, claiming that “a third of covid-19 patients admitted to UK hospitals die.”1 On Twitter, The BMJ added “putting the fatality rate on par with Ebola,” on the basis of a quote from one of the study’s authors. Unsurprisingly, this generated news …
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