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Trump's Favorite Coronavirus Metric, The Case Fatality, Is Unreliable

President Trump often cites the coronavirus case fatality rate, saying it is more important than the number of cases or deaths. But medical experts say it's not a good way to measure the pandemic.

Copyright 2020 NPR

Corrected: July 23, 2020 at 10:00 PM MDT
A previous version of the story incorrectly defined the case fatality rate as the number of cases divided by deaths. In fact, it is calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the number of diagnosed cases.
Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. Keith has chronicled the Trump administration from day one, putting this unorthodox presidency in context for NPR listeners, from early morning tweets to executive orders and investigations. She covered the final two years of the Obama presidency, and during the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association.