Coronavirus vs. fake news: which one will get to you first?

Article - Matei N. Balan

A new rendering of the pandemic coronavirus Covid-19 done by Fusion Medical Animation. The virus has now officially been labeled as a pandemic, effecting the whole world.

Photo: Fusion Medical Animation / Unsplash

We all know what we have to do. Wash our hands, limit social interactions as much as possible, keep a healthy diet, and do not panic. This is great advice in the midst of a pandemic. But we also have to talk about keeping ourselves safe from the spreading fake news on the subject.

It is now more important than ever to be skeptical about everything that we read, and that hasn’t been provided by a trustworthy newspaper, government officials or the World Health Organization. Beyond all the memes and the other types of user-generated content that keep us in good spirits, there’s a lot of misinformation out there that can be outright dangerous in the current situation. In fact, the situation is so serious that W.H.O has called the situation an "infodemic”.

There’s little that Big Tech can do about it this time

The social media giants are struggling to fight the spread of rumors and conspiracy theories but to little avail for the moment. According to Politico, Big Tech and government agencies have managed to put together highly effective task forces that can fight coordinated misinformation campaigns, “but they are relatively powerless to clamp down on this sort of grassroots, user-created misinformation that has become the bread-and-butter for how falsities spread across social media as fast as the virus itself is jumping from country to country.”

There is no witch-doctor vaccine against Covid-19

Amongst the most prominent rumors that have been circulating online, and that seemed to have some scientific facts behind it, was the sauna one. It sounds like this: if you know you’ve just come into contact with an infected person, then immediately going into a sauna for 20 minutes and inhaling 90°C hot air is instantly going to kill the virus. The myth was debunked on Tuesday, by Michael Osterholm, an American expert in infectious disease epidemiology, on the Joe Rogan podcast. Osterholm said that while saunas are healthy, just as before, they do nothing to stop the virus. He also mentioned that it’s insane to say that we inhale 90°C hot air in a sauna since our lungs would collapse from the heat (the hot air we breathe in gets cooled down as it enters our body). This is a good example of things that sounds backed by facts and science being in the end completely different than actual facts and science.

But slayer-virus-saunas are nothing in comparison to what a mere rumor of infection can cause. According to BuzzFeed, Novi Sanzhary, a small city in Ukraine, was torn apart by such rumors that started online mixed together with a lack of transparency from the authorities. Riots broke out, a few cops were injured, a whole lot of people arrested and the panic spread far and wide.

W.H.O is the main trustworthy source

So, while you wash your hands make sure that you’re more than selective with what you read. The World Health Organization has even put together a new section on its website called Myth Busters. You’ll find everything there. Including the fact that UV lights should NOT be used to sterilize hands, and that neither garlic or antibiotics do not work against the virus.

Read more about the coronavirus Covid-19:

- Koronaviruset: Kultur-Norge vert satt på pause

- Medias fremstilling av koronaviruset

- Coronaviruset setter en stopper for den nye James Bond-filmen