As Ed pointed out this morning, Justice Sotomayor received a bunch of fact-checks for some comments she made during oral arguments last week. Sotomayor had claimed there were “over 100,000 children” in serious condition with many on ventilators. But that wasn’t remotely accurate.

Today, the ladies of the View addressed Sotomayor’s comments and Sunny Hostin not only defended Sotomayor but put forward another misleading figure about kids with COVID. Hat tip to Caleb Howe who posted this clip on Twitter:

The View's Sunny Hostin says even though Justice Sotomayor was wrong on the facts, she was still right on the facts "That's a real thing and those are real numbers." pic.twitter.com/7XWbtFGfFj

— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) January 10, 2022

In defense of Sotomayor Hostin said, “She is correct that we have more children in the hospital now more than ever before. And it certainly reflects the current cases in children. Right now we have 82,843 children sick with COVID.”

But that figure she just mentioned is not the number of “current cases” or the number sick with COVID “right now” as Hostin framed it. In fact, that figure represents the total number of children hospitalized with COVID since August of 2020, more than 17 months ago. If Hostin had read Glenn Kessler’s fact check she would have known that [emphasis added]:

That was the current figure as of Saturday when Kessler published his story. If you check the CDC COVID tracker now the cumulative number of hospitalized kids is up to 85,369, but again that’s since August 1, 2020.

What Hostin has done here is make the same error that Justice Sotomayor made, i.e. giving a vastly inflated figure for the current number of sick kids. She almost clarifies it at the end of that clip saying fewer than 83,000 have been hospitalized, but at best she’s made a muddle of it. The casual viewer might easily believe she’s talking about current cases of kids with COVID.

This isn’t the first time the View hosts have shoved aside the issue of science in favor of politics. Just last week they all sided with the Chicago Teacher’s Union when it decided to stop showing up for in person classes because of concern about COVID. The word “science” never even appeared in their 5-minute clip about it.

As you’ll see at the end of this full clip of the discussion today, Sara Haines points out another problem with the CDC numbers. Every child who enters the hospital for any reason is being tested for COVID. So the fact that there are about 85,000 cumulative COVID cases among kids does not mean that 85,000 kids came to the hospital because they were unable to breath. An unknown number of these kids may be hospitalized for other reasons and may be asymptomatic. We don’t really know how many because the CDC still hasn’t separated out the people hospitalized with COVID from those hospitalized from COVID. But the bottom line is Justice Sotomayor was way off and Sunny Hostin made basically the same mistake trying to defend her.

Addendum: I got into an argument over Kessler’s fact-check this weekend on Twitter. Charlotte Clymer was arguing that Kessler also needed to fact-check Justice Gorsuch for an error she believed he had made.

.@GlennKesslerWP, whose work I usually respect, decided to write an article fact-checking a claim by Sotomayor. The problem is that Gorsuch made a pretty dubious claim, and Kessler believes he did not. Here's a short thread with the clear evidence that Gorsuch did. (thread) https://t.co/jezIhFUJu4

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) January 8, 2022

Here's the audio from the hearing. I clipped it to the exact statement. You can find the full audio here (the exact quote is at -16:06): https://t.co/Kt5KAFE6iz

In it, Gorsuch clearly says "hundreds of thousands". pic.twitter.com/yB7qxZSWs3

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) January 8, 2022

Kessler pointed out that he had listened to the audio “ten times” before she brought it up and that the audio didn’t support the claim about what Gorsuch said.

I listened to this audio ten times — I always check the audio when writing fact checks — and I hear that he says "Flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year." There is no "of" as far as I can tell. He also prefaces it with "I believe" — important qualifier.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) January 8, 2022

After listening to it several times myself, I agreed with Kessler (which regular readers know I don’t always do). Clymer then disagreed with me as she did with several other people who heard it the same way.

And I think you are bothsides-ing this, and there's no need to do that. Gorsuch said "hundreds of thousands". I'm sorry if you don't believe that, but it's not my responsibility to make you or anyone else more comfortable in that opinion. I think you're wrong.

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) January 8, 2022

Today, the court released an updated transcript of what Justice Gorsuch said. Their revised version reads, “The flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.” I pointed this out to Clymer just in case she missed it.

Just wanted to point this out in case you missed it. Corrected transcript: pic.twitter.com/gfzVWdYyGI

— John Sexton (@verumserum) January 10, 2022

Anyway, this was obvious to most people who listened to it. Glad the court correct it.

Update: I should have know. This is where the attack on Gorsuch was coming from:

The flu kills about 30,000 Americans each year. I'm kinda surprised Gorsuch would broadcast his ignorance like this. I looked this up with help from Google in about 10 seconds. https://t.co/6EC0BMC0yD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 7, 2022

He did admit it was unclear a day later.

Either way, there’s no equivalence between the harm caused by the flu, which kills about 30k Americans a year, and Covid, which has killed well over 800k in two years. So regardless of what Gorsuch meant to say, he’s not making a good point.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 8, 2022