How the New York Times overemphasizes raw case numbers and alarming anecdotes at the expense of giving readers context.

By Alexander Russo

Earlier this week, the New York Times came out with a major new interactive focused on the hot-button issue of students and school staff who have been infected with COVID-19.

Headlined What We Know About Coronavirus Cases in K-12 Schools So Far, the Times piece does a good job pointing out the lack of enough reliable data about COVID-19 cases detected in schools, and it’s helpful at pointing out the many inconsistencies and possible misinterpretations surrounding the data.

“Thousands of coronavirus cases have already been linked to U.S. schools,” notes the story. “But more than a month after the first school districts welcomed students back for in-person instruction, it’s nearly impossible to tally a precise figure.”

Many states aren’t gathering and reporting enough detailed, reliable data.

However, this is a story that several other outlets have already reported, and the Times piece isn’t content to stick there, where it’s on firm ground. Instead, the story goes on to report the messy and incomplete raw case numbers that are available — without providing information about the overall number of students and staff that would make the numbers meaningful.

And it also presents a handful of alarming anecdotes about school districts’ reopening experiences that aren’t fully representative of what we know about early reopening experiences or even the Times’ own previous reporting.

The overall effect is to emphasize raw case numbers that may or may not represent transmission or outbreaks, and to suggest that infections, quarantines, and temporary school closings have been a common experience among schools that have resumed in-person instruction.

Subsequent stories that have come out from the Washington Post and NPR illustrate a better way of reporting COVID-19 case data – and provide a substantially different narrative.

UPDATE: The Times’ latest COVID-related story, 100 N.Y.C. School Buildings Have Already Reported a Positive Case, exhibits some of the same problems cited here.

Above: The Times’ What We Know About Coronavirus Cases in K-12 Schools So Far

Accompanied with helpful visuals, the Times story does include good information about which states do and don’t report school-related COVID data, and what kinds of data are being shared out with the public.

Eleven states including California and Maryland still don’t report any school-specific information, according to the Times. Many of those that do report use methods and definitions that vary widely, from detailed to much less so.

The Times piece also generally takes a calm tone, rather than using charged or emotional language to amplify its findings.

COVID on campus was inevitable once students and staff started to return, the Times piece notes. But that doesn’t mean that campus is where the infections or transmissions are taking place. The disease might just as well have “followed” students and staff onto campus.

“The numbers alone cannot answer whether reopening schools was safe or not, for students, employees or the surrounding community,” notes the Times. “Even in the long run, [experts] say, it will be very difficult to separate the effect of opening schools from other changes…”

Above: One of the several depictions of raw case data in the Times story.

In these ways, the Times piece is to be admired for being better than some of the previous coverage about COVID cases and schools, too much of which has been alarmist and anecdotal.

But this story has been written several times already, including by USA Today and NBC News. And, as a handful of observers noted, there are some serious problems with the Times piece.

“Are we actually cheering this for a non-alarmist tone?” tweeted parent and education advocate Karen Vaites. “Is that how low the bar is?”

In addition, Vaites and others pointed out that, while measured in some regards, the Times story is guilty of rehashing alarming anecdotes that won national attention in August without going back and updating readers on whether the initial spikes turned into full-blown outbreaks or subsided.

The Times also ignores some of its own coverage of school reopening experiences, including last weekend’s How One District Got Its Students Back Into Classrooms.

Above: The Times story focuses readers’ attention on raw numbers of cases reported, independent of other key variables such as the size of the district or the local infection rate. 

There are other, more technical problems with the Times story that are no less important.

“Where is the denominator?” asked Teachers College’s professor Sarah Cohodes, referring to the lack of any numbers showing the numbers of students and staff who make up the populations of the states and districts the Times describes.

“This is an important project,” tweeted Harvard public health professor Joseph Allen about the Times story, but “we won’t learn much (anything) just by counting cases.”

By the Times’ own reporting, the K-12 COVID data are messy and questionable in accuracy and completeness, requiring a long series of caveats and qualifications. However, the Times blows past its own lengthy lists of caveats by presenting the case statistics anyway.

Making matters worse, the data are presented as raw numbers of cases instead of rates or percentages that would show how pervasive or rare infections are at schools, given the size of the school or district.

The Times’ college COVID tracker made the same mistake.

Above: NPR’s A New Coronavirus School Dashboard Tracks Infections shows cases in relation to the overall population of students and staff.

Estimating the number of kids or school staff who have returned to in-person learning is a challenge. But it’s far from impossible.

“I’ve shared district-reported data from two Florida districts just this week,” tweeted 50CAN policy adviser Liz Cohen. “And was able to estimate denominator by looking around a bit.”

Indeed, the Washington Post and NPR were able to demonstrate how news outlets can provide additional context and give raw case numbers meaning with their latest stories on the same topic, using a new, third-party database.

On Wednesday, NPR reported that the new database of school districts found 230 cases per 100,000 students (and 490 per 100,000 staff members) over the first two weeks of September, including confirmed and suspected cases in both online and in-person settings.

The Post reported the same data as a percentage: 0.23 percent of students had a confirmed or suspected case of the coronavirus over a two-week period. Among teachers, it was 0.49 percent.

Above: The Washington Post’s Opening school buildings has not spread the coronavirus, early data shows.

This anonymous, self-selected approach can’t tell you how many students and staff were infected in Omaha. And the sample size is quite small. So the Times deserves respect for its effort to pull together and present useful information that’s available, as well as adding some new data from the districts it surveyed directly.

“Given what they had, they did great,” Brown University’s Emily Oster said in a recent phone call. Oster, who is among the leaders in developing the database used by NPR and the Post, doesn’t object to the Times’ decision to present raw case numbers without providing denominators. “I’m generally in favor of more data rather than less.”

However, the database developed by Oster and presented by NPR and the Post has the significant advantage of allowing comparisons between different populations and types of community.

As noted in the Post, early estimates of school-based infection rates are “far below what is found in the surrounding communities.” As noted by NPR, the infection rates for students and staff are in the orange and red zones, based on established guidelines.

Going forward, I hope that reporters and outlets will find ways to include both raw case numbers and population-based measures in their reopening coverage.

Previous commentary:

How to cover New York City’s school reopening

In-person learning’s tentative successes deserve more coverage

Smart ways to report on COVID cases detected in schools 

How to avoid writing needlessly alarmist school reopening stories

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo

Alexander Russo is founder and editor of The Grade, an award-winning effort to help improve media coverage of education issues. He’s also a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship winner and a book author. You can reach him at @alexanderrusso.

Visit their website at: https://the-grade.org/