One article making the rounds, from the New York Daily News, is headlined “A spike in New Yorkers ingesting household cleaners following Trump’s controversial coronavirus comments.” But the article makes no mention of anyone deliberately consuming household cleaners. It simply states that 30 people called the city’s poison “over fears that they had ingested bleach or other household cleaners.”

Fearing that you ingested something doesn’t jibe with having intentionally consumed that substance.

The authors of the Daily News piece, Anna Sanders and Chris Sommerfeldt, try to circumvent this inconvenient fact by noting that over the same time period in 2019, the Poison Control Center “only handled 13 similar cases.” And while this time, nine calls were about possible Lysol exposure and ten about bleach, last year’s calls contained “no cases reported about Lysol exposure and only two were specifically in regards to bleach.”

The paper doesn’t present any other data about calls to Poison Control for comparison.