# Study of the impact of coronavirus messaging on death rates **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [April 23, 2020, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/study-of-the-impact-of-coronavirus-messaging-on-death-rates/852407 "2020-04-23T04:11:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/study-of-the-impact-of-coronavirus-messaging-on-death-rates/852407/1 "2020-04-23T04:11:23Z")
I’ll say upfront, this is still undergoing peer review, so it’s not final. It’s a study comparing messaging by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, and impacts on death rates. As you might know, Carlson has been advocating for distancing and caution for quite a while, where Hannity has referred to it as a hoax. The authors concluded that the latter messaging actually led to more deaths. I’ve only skimmed the article once, & I have to say I opened it think it was gonna be some stupid inferential study, but it turns out there’s much less inference than I guessed, since they went to actual viewers and quizzed them on their behaviors. Editing because I kept typing it out and it would crash, so I’m doing it in smaller chunks: First, it’s hard to not make this political, would it be good if we could comment and not make it so. Second, some of the conclusion is obvious, but as I used to tell the modelers who worked for me, even an obvious conclusion is important because it provides actual scale/relative outcomes. > **[Misinformation During a Pandemic | BFI](https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2020-44/)** > > Media outlets often present diverging, even conflicting, perspectives on reality — not only informing, but potentially misinforming audiences. We study the extent to which misinformation broadcast on mass...