Who's Checking the Fact Checkers

Recently I found myself looking through a web article on costuming flaws that went unnoticed in some fairly popular movies. One of the goofs they recognized is from Django Unchained. I have never seen the movie but I understand one of the characters played by Jamie Foxx wears sunglasses. According to the "experts," sunglasses did not exist during that time period. They said sunglasses didn't appear until the 1920's or 1930's. Had I not recently done some research on the subject I would have believed them. Last summer I spent a week involved in a period re-enactment and did a lot of research on what cowboys and pioneers would have worn around the 1840's. I found some actual sunglasses from around 1845 so I know they existed in that time period. They were not very popular but they did exist. I guess the fact checkers got that one wrong.

Fast forward to the recent events and I spent some time scrolling through the latest CNN posts relating to COVID-19. They had an article talking about how President Trump is reluctant to enact a country-wide shelter-in-place order. He states that he does not want to do so as some states don't need one. CNN then inserted a fact that COVID-19 is found in all states, implying that all states should have a shelter-in-place order. I happen to live in one of those states that don't require a state-wide-shelter-in-place. Utah has close to 1000 cases but most of them are in Salt Lake with a few down in St. George. There is still a lot of parts of Utah unaffected by the virus. Should we punish the entire state? I don't think so. A lot of the state is very rural with very few people who are also notorious for not getting out much. Furthermore there are a lot of farms and we want all those people to go to work. Food is kind of important for us all. For the record, President Trump is correct in leaving the decision of shelter-in-place orders up to individual state governors. I wish CNN would realize that not everyone lives in cities and do a bit more fact checking before trying to force something on areas that don't need shelter-in-place orders.

Speaking of facts, what other things are the fact checkers getting wrong with COVID-19? Does anyone believe the numbers of people infected coming out of certain countries? China has admitted that they are not including those who test positive for COVID-19 but are asymptomatic. My guess is their numbers should be a lot higher. It has taken a while to create enough test kits to get everyone tested that wants one. Even in the United States, people have had to threaten legal action before getting tested. Now think about some of the other less wealthy countries and my guess is their numbers are very much under-represented.

A lot of people are relying on the daily tallies of new cases for COVID-19 to create models of how the disease is spreading throughout the world. If the numbers we have are wrong then so are the models. That means we don't really know what is happening. As we are getting better at diagnosing how many people are coming down sick, we might be tapering off but not know it. We may also be much worse than we realize. Fortunately the state of Utah has come out and said that we have enough test kits for anyone that has reason to believe they have been infected. My hope is that we can identify everyone that has been infected and keep the rest of us from getting sick.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of sitting down and reading the paper. Say what you will about a good old fashioned newspaper but they have editors that require extensive fact checking before they print an article. I only wished CNN would live up to most newspaper's standards. The paper had a great article on what is taking place in the world. It explained a few things that have been glossed over in many of the Internet articles. My point is that you have to be careful with the information you gather on the Internet and not believe everything you read.