Karin Prien, the President of the Conference of Ministers of Education, has shut down her Twitter channel after causing outrage with a tweet about child mortality in the pandemic.

“Please differentiate: children are dying.

This is extremely tragic.

But they die with Covid-19 and only extremely rarely because of Covid-19.” That was the minister’s answer to a woman who presented herself in her personal information as a teacher and bookworm and on February 11 with reference to Prien’s statements in the Talk show written by Markus Lanz: "We have had 17 dead children in the last 4 weeks.

17 - in four weeks.

And it's getting faster and faster.

By October 21 we had 27 dead children, since October 38. So in 4.5 months more than in 18 months.

A total of 65 children died.

Sixty-five."

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

  • Follow I follow

On February 14, a text entitled “Children significantly less at risk” was published on the “Tagesschau” website in the “Faktenfinder” section.

The “Faktenfinder” is managed by a separate NDR editorial team, which claims to check the accuracy of allegations made in public disputes and thereby promote clarification.

In this case, the result is: “The CDU politician Prien was severely criticized for pointing out that few children die from Covid-19.

Available data proves her right.” The author is Patrick Gensing.

Where do the numbers come from?

In the original version of the text, Gensing wrote about the tweet, to whose author Prien had addressed her request for differentiation: "Where the information came from that there had recently been '17 dead children' remains unclear." It would have been easy for Gensing to find the actual basis of the number.

Their precision suggested from the outset that Prien's critic was referring to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), whose duties include collecting and publishing the number of cases.

And if she hadn't had her number from this source, it could probably have been corrected with RKI numbers.

The RKI publishes a weekly updated table based on the cases reported by the health authorities.

There, deaths are broken down by age and gender.

In the most recent table, as of February 9, the numbers are 35 for the under 10 age group and 30 for the 10 to 19 age group.

The total is 65, the comparison value from the table as of January 12 is 48.

NDR was informed from various quarters that the critic had arrived at her figure by subtracting this official data.

Markus Pössel, research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and responsible for science communication there, dedicated an exhaustive meta-fact check to the fact check of the ARD news department in his blog on the page of the magazine "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" with devastating results.