CDC coding error led to overcount of 72,000 Covid deaths

Calls for agency to communicate clearly and transparently after error, corrected last week, inadvertently added deaths to tracker

A quiet change to how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publicly reports Covid death details underscores the need for the agency to communicate clearly and transparently about rapidly evolving science, experts say.

The past two years have created numerous communication challenges for the agency, which works with massive amounts of data from scores of different sources, including states and territories.