The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the deterioration of the Miami Herald. Always questionable and sometimes laughable, the hacks at the Herald are topping themselves every day, so we're going to document every step of the paper's inevitable road to oblivion.
First up, this horribly headlined piece about the results of a University of Miami study.
As the piece states, the study indicates that,"about 6 percent of Miami-Dade’s population — about 165,000 residents — have antibodies indicating a past infection by the novel coronavirus, dwarfing the state health department’s tally of about 10,600 cases."
These aren't "missed infections" as the headline claims, they are asymptomatic cases which reflect similarities to studies conducted in Northern and Southern California by Stanford and USC respectively.
Also, note that the Herald doesn't draw any implications from these results, the most notable would be a much larger denominator in the fatality ratio. In other words, the chances of dying of COVID-19 are much lower than the "confirmed cases" number would indicate.
This is great news because as of this writing 287 people have died in Miami-Dade County out of 10,793 confirmed cases. That's a 2.66% fatality rate. But plug in the estimate of 165,000 cases and that yields a fatality rate of 0.17%. For reference, the experts say the average seasonal flu has a fatality rate of 0.1%.
But you'd never know this great news because the Herald has demonstrated over the last two months that it's more interested in sensationalizing the virus, causing a panic and goading politicians into irrational policies than telling any story that goes against their chosen narrative.
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