Coronavirus - its 'Disinformation' & 'Misinformation!
Original: March 12, 2020; Update:
The following is unedited version.
Coronavirus
How To Tell Who's ... When They're Talking About Coronavirus
There’s a lot of information and misinformation out there about COVID-19. One hallmark that distinguishes legit experts from quacks and attention seekers is if someone speaks with absolute certainty, they’re probably making it up!
This is a new virus
This coronavirus was unknown to science before December. If somebody tells you a certain supplement or diet or anything will “work” against coronavirus, they’re wrong. None of that has been tested. There are a few antiviral drugs being tested, including remdesivir. We don’t have results yet, and won’t for a while. Please do not believe any copy-pasted chain letter that tells you that zinc is “proven” to work or that the government is hushing up kratom’s effectiveness. The studies have not been done - simply cannot be done.
Health departments worldwide have been watching China since they dealt with this disease first, and quickly, and apparently effectively. Findings from the World Health Organisation’s China report are here, if you’d like to read. Social distancing seemed to work well, for example. But there’s still no guarantee that what worked in China will work the same way everywhere else. There are just too many factors (biological, social, economic) to predict anything with certainty.
We’ve never seen a virus like this spread worldwide before
It has also not yet spread worldwide, and we don’t know how each country’s health system will be able to handle it. It doesn’t matter whether somebody is telling you not to worry, or if they are predicting apocalyptic doom, we simply do not know how bad this is going to get. It’s not really fair to compare the death rate or the R0 of a brand-new, still-expanding pandemic to that of a disease like flu or measles that’s well-established worldwide and that many people are already vaccinated against.
The real experts keep updating their interpretation of the situation. I have not seen actual epidemiologists or virologists or public health experts say one thing and stick to it. They emphasize that we are learning as we go, making judgment calls as necessary, and constantly updating our understanding of the disease.
Change is good, actually
As the situation evolves, you want to see recommendations change. Before the outbreak hits your country, it’s smart for people to wash their hands and for healthcare workers to understand what to do if they’re the one to see the first coronavirus case.
Once a few cases are present, it makes sense to track down contacts of each sick person, and consider those people to be the ones at risk of contracting the disease, with other people still washing their hands and being prepared but not worried. And then once there are enough cases in a country or community that you can’t trace every one of them, social distancing begins to make a lot of sense. This is the stage we’re entering now, in the US.
So first we were told to wash our hands and not worry; then everybody was making a big deal about a few cases; and now everything’s getting cancelled all of a sudden? Yes, and that’s pretty much how it should be.
In changing times it can feel comforting to see somebody hold strong to the same message no matter what. But an appropriate response evolves as the situation does, so change is a good thing. Even if some information you get appears to be legit, check with up-to-date sources (like the WHO) to make sure it still applies.
Fake Facts Are Flying About Coronavirus. Now There's A Plan To Debunk Them
The World Health Organization is sharing social media posts to debunk widely circulated rumors about coronavirus cures. The coronavirus outbreak has sparked what the World Health Organization is calling an "infodemic" — an overwhelming amount of information on social media and websites. Some of it's accurate. And some is downright untrue. The false statements range from a conspiracy theory that the virus is a man-made bioweapon to the claim that more than 100,000 have died from the disease (as of this week, there are more than 3800 reported fatalities world wide).
WHO is fighting back. In early January, a few weeks after China reported the first cases, the U.N. agency launched a pilot program to make sure the facts about the newly identified virus are communicated to the public. The project is called EPI-WIN — short for WHO Information Network for Epidemics. "We need a vaccine against misinformation," said Dr. Mike Ryan, head of WHO's health emergencies program, at a WHO briefing on the virus in February.
The Coronavirus Outbreak - What you should know
While this is not the first health crisis that has been characterized by online misinformation — it happened with Ebola, for example — researchers are especially concerned because this outbreak is centered in China. The world's most populous country has the largest market of Internet users globally: 21% of the world's 3.8 billion Internet users are in China.
And fake news can spread quickly online. A 2018 study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does." The reason, say the researchers, may be that the untrue statements inspire strong feelings such as fear, disgust and surprise.
This dynamic could cause fake coronavirus cures and treatments to fan out widely on social media — and as a result, worsen the impact of the outbreak, says Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Over the past decade, he has been tracking the effect of digital technology on issues such as global health and economic development. The rumors offer remedies that have no basis in science. One untrue statement suggests that rubbing sesame oil on the skin will block the coronavirus.
If segments of the public turn to false treatments rather than follow the advice of trusted sources for avoiding illness (like frequent hand-washing with soap and water), it could cause "the disease to travel further and faster than it ordinarily would have," says Chakravorti.
There could be a political agenda behind the fake coronavirus news as well. Countries that are antagonistic toward China could try to hijack the conversation in hopes of creating chaos and eroding trust in the authorities, says Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, research director for Harvard Belfer Center's Security and Global Health Project. "Disinformation that specifically targets your health system or your leaders who are trying to manage an emergency is a way of destroying, undermining, disrupting your health system," she says.
In the instance of vaccines, Russian bots have been identified as fueling skepticism about the effectiveness of vaccination for childhood diseases in the U.S. The World Health Organization's EPI-WIN team believes that the countermeasure for misinformation and disinformation is simply to tell the truth. It works rapidly to debunk unjustified medical claims on social media. In a series of bright blue graphics posted on Instagram, EPI-WIN states categorically that neither sesame oil nor breathing in the smoke of fire or fireworks will kill the new coronavirus.
Part of this truth-telling strategy involves enlisting large-scale employers. The approach, says Melinda Frost, an officer on the EPI-WIN team, is based on the idea that employers are the most trusted institution in society, a finding reflected in a 2020 study on global trust from the public relations firm Edelman: "People tend to trust their employers more than they trust several other sources of information."
Over the past several weeks, Frost and her team have been organizing rounds of conference calls with representatives from Fortune 500 companies and other multinational corporations in sectors such as health, travel and tourism, food and agriculture, and business. The company representatives share questions that their employees might have about the coronavirus outbreak — for example, is it safe to go to conferences? The EPI-WIN team gathers the frequently asked questions, has their experts answer them within a few days, and then sends the responses back to the companies to distribute in internal newsletters and other communication.
Because the information is coming from their employer, says Frost, the hope is that people will be more likely to believe what they hear and pass the information on to their family and community. Bourdeaux at Harvard calls this approach a "smart move." It borrows from "advertising techniques from the 1950s," she adds. "They're establishing the narrative before anybody else can. They are going on offense, saying, 'Here are the facts.' "
WHO is also collaborating with tech giants like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok to limit the spread of harmful rumors. It's pursuing a similar tactic with Chinese digital companies such as Baidu, Tencent and Weibo. "We are asking them to filter out false information and promote accurate information from credible sources like WHO, CDC [the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and others. And we thank them for their efforts so far," said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, in a briefing earlier this month.
Twitter, for example, now actively bumps up credible sources such as WHO and the CDC in search results for the term "coronavirus." "We're also taking proactive action on any coordinated attempts to undermine the public conversation on this critical issue," wrote a Twitter spokesperson in a statement to NPR.
Facebook (which is one of NPR's financial sponsors) is implementing similar strategies. "When people search for information related to the virus on Facebook, we will surface an educational pop-up with credible information in multiple languages and countries," wrote a Facebook spokesperson in a statement to NPR. "We've connected people to regional health ministries in several countries, for example: The Center for Health Protection in Hong Kong, Taiwan Center for Disease Control in Taiwan, the Republic of the Philippines Department of Health in the Philippines, the Ministry of Health in Italy." Facebook has taken the extra step of deploying fact-checkers to remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories about the outbreak. Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at Facebook, wrote in a statement about one such rumor that it has eliminated from its platform: that drinking bleach cures coronavirus.
Chakravorti applauds WHO's coordination with the digital companies — but says he's particularly impressed with Facebook's efforts. "This is a radical departure from Facebook's past record, including its controversial insistence on permitting false political ads," he wrote in an op-ed in Bloomberg News. Still, there is no silver bullet to fighting health misinformation. It has become "very, very difficult to fight effectively," says Chakravorti of Tufts University. A post making a false claim about coronavirus can just "jump platforms," he says. "So you might have Facebook taking down a post, but then the post finds its way on Twitter, then it jumps from Twitter to YouTube."
In addition to efforts by WHO and other organizations, individuals are doing their part. On Wednesday, The Lancet published a statement from 27 public health scientists addressing rumors that the coronavirus had been engineered in a Wuhan lab: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin .... Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus."
Dr. Deliang Tang, a molecular epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, says his friends from medical school and his research colleagues in China find it difficult to trust Chinese health authorities, especially after police reprimanded the eight Chinese doctors who warned others about a pneumonia-like disease in December. As a result, Tang's network in China has been looking to him and others in the scientific community to share information. Since the outbreak began, Tang says he has been answering "30 to 50 questions a night." Many want to fact-check rumors or learn about clinical trials for a potential cure.
References:
Gharib, Malaka (2020, February 21). The Coronavirus Crisis: Fake Facts Are Flying About Coronavirus. Now There's A Plan To Debunk Them, NPR - Heard on All Things Considered https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/21/805287609/theres-a-flood-of-fake-news-about-coronavirus-and-a-plan-to-stop-it
Skwarecki, Beth (2020, March 13). How To Tell Who's Full Of Shit When They're Talking About Coronavirus. Lifehacker, https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/03/how-to-tell-whos-full-of-shit-when-theyre-talking-about-coronavirus/
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