  The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought science to the fore of the public
discourse and considering the complexity of the issues involved, with it also
the challenge of effective and informative science communication. A
particularly contentious topic, in that it is both highly emotional in and of
itself, as well as in that it sits at the nexus of the decision-making process
regarding the handling of the pandemic, which has effected lockdowns, social
behaviour measures, business closures, and others, concerns the recording and
the reporting of the disease mortality. To clarify a point which has caused
much controversy and anger in the public debate, the first part of the present
article discusses the very fundamentals underlying the issue of causative
attribution with regards to mortality, lays out the foundations of the
statistical means of mortality estimation, and concretizes these by analysing
the recording and reporting practices adopted in England, and their widespread
misrepresentations. The second part of the article is empirical in nature. I
present data and an analysis of how COVID-19 mortality has been reported in the
mainstream media in the UK and the USA, including a comparative analysis both
across the two countries as well as across different media outlets. The
findings clearly demonstrate a uniform and worrying lack of understanding of
the relevant technical subject matter by the media in both countries. Of
particular interest is the finding that with a remarkable regularity
($\rho>0.998$) the greater the number of articles a media outlet published on
COVID-19 mortality, the greater the \emph{proportion} of its articles
misrepresented the disease mortality figures.
