Covid-19: pandemic or infodemic Elizabeth Gallagher Upper Sixth
Covid-19: pandemic or infodemic ‘5G radiation’ is ‘exacerbating’ the contagion’s spread and making it more lethal.’ These claims were tweeted by the American actor Woody Harrelson in early April, and have since been robustly debunked by leading scientists across the world. However, with this tweet receiving over 25,000 likes before it was deleted and the conspiracies having been similarly propagated by British celebrities such as Amanda Holden and Eamon Holmes, the rumours – at least for a time – got ahead of the facts. This is the nature of the ‘infodemic’ that we are currently facing; a term coined by the Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to describe the phenomenon of fake news ‘spreading faster and more easily’ than the virus itself, potentially hampering a public health response and creating confusion and distrust. The disinformation is spread via human-to-human ‘contact’ and multiplies exponentially, just like the virus. So, even though the outbreak of a pandemic on this scale is not unknown or necessarily unexpected – for example the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic reportedly killed up to 50 million people, far higher than anything for Covid-19 so far – the current opportunity
for information to be disseminated rapidly across the world has created a new set of challenges. It cannot be denied that technology has in some respects helped the international community respond to the virus, including the sharing of data on vast scale, the rapid deployment of personal protective equipment (PPE) across the world and even moving critical patients across borders. The problem, however, is not the technology itself, rather who and how it is used: for example, the Chinese government has been accused of being too slow to release the genetic data, and disinformation has spread at lightning speed, whether statesponsored or simply reckless individuals.
million links to unreliable information had been shared on Twitter alone; one of the few social networks to allow its data to be analysed. His review suggests that disinformation was spreading at a far faster rate than the virus itself, as the number of links shared on Twitter far exceeded the number of globally reported infections by that date.
[B]y 14th March, 1.7 million links to unreliable information had been shared on Twitter alone.
In fact, disinformation is arguably worsening the economic, political and social impacts of an already deadly virus and intensifying the threat that governments and populations alike face. And the scale of misinformation – the ‘infodemic’ – is extraordinary. For example, Manilo De Domenico, an Italian scientist, began collecting data on 22nd January (the day that Wuhan was put under lockdown) and discovered that by 14th March, 1.7
It is likely that we have all fallen victim to the ‘infodemic’ at some point in the last few months. How many of us believed the claim that holding your breath for ten seconds without coughing meant you did not have the virus, or hesitated when seeing Facebook posts claiming that coronavirus ‘hates the sun’ and can be prevented by taking ‘a few sips of water every 15 minutes’? Both of these claims lack any scientifically-based evidence whatsoever. What is particularly worrying is the potentially lethal implications of fake news during a pandemic such as Covid-19. If an individual believes that sipping water is the only preventative measure they have to take, she could be putting both herself and others at a much greater risk of infection. The extent of this ‘infodemic’ is concerning. And never more so than when the President of the United States, arguably the most powerful man in the world, himself suggested in his daily news conference on 23rd April that doctors could ‘look into’ injecting disinfectant into patients to ‘clean’ the lungs - an action that anyone with any basic biological knowledge would understand as being potentially very harmful. Despite the public backlash and denouncement by disinfectant manufacturers, this dangerous notion took hold in many communities. For example, both the Maryland Emergency Management Agency and a poison control centre in New York reported a higher than usual number of calls the day following the blunder. The incident begs the question of whether the President of the United States was himself a victim of disinformation. The overwhelming popularity of
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