The behviour of Covid-19 disease continues to baffle everyone – be it a common man, a health professional or the government. So far, we have witnessed over three lac deaths and almost thirty lac people infected in the country in just three months. Even as we are yet to see any weakening of the deadly impact of the virus in the ongoing second wave, experts have triggered panic button about third wave, which they say is in the offing in a couple of months. This has added more to the Covid-induced woes of the people.
As we have been told about phases of this disease, we cannot overlook the fact that there is still so much unclear about the pandemic since its gobal outbreak in January 2020. The erratic behavior of the virus while invading human habitations has raised some important questions which our host of health experts has failed to answer.
Why some get really sick and others do not? What is the degree of the virus in terms of being transmissible and deadly? What would be the exact period of observing social restrictions, use of masks and sanitizers? What’s exactly going to happen in post-Covid scenario? These are few basic questions which have still remained unanswered.
In the virus-induced mayhem, economy has nose-dived, leaving millions jobless and millions faced drastic fall in their income. Social set-up has derailed as societies have been forced to remain in paused mode. Precisely, it’s a never-seen-before crisis in most people’s living memory that has caused so much disorder in the human civilization at such a scale and pace.
However, at a time when we are facing death threat more conspicuously from the virus, irresponsible statements under ‘Covid awareness’ tag by a breed of so-called experts, especially health professionals, has been confounding people. This breed of self-styled ‘Covid experts’ take advantage of pervasiveness of social media and continuously come up with their unfounded analysis on the disease only to get noticed. The misinformation campaign on Covid crisis unleashed by these brazen-faced ‘experts’ has gathered momentum at a time when the crisis has turned too big even for skilled professionals in the field of virology to comprehend it fully.
In other words, the huge volume of COVID-19 online misinformation is what experts say “crowding out” the accurate public health guidance. Thus, complicating the task of combating the virus.
The extreme nature of this health emergency, when authentic treatment protocol is still nowhere in sight and vaccines too have fallen victim to politics, anxious people are always on a look-out for information to understand the risk to health. It’s here self-styled Covid experts from the medical field take route of social media platforms with their own version of ‘Dos & Don’ts”. Ironically, their recommendations lack uniformity and are mostly in contrast to each other. During the course, formal recommendations from medical experts who have an authority to speak on the disease get gagged by the bombardment of these misinformation campaigns.
In the first instance, it’s not bad to know more and more about the virus which is taking heavy toll of human lives across global boundaries. More and more information will power the people to fight the disease at least in an organized way. But what matters in dissemination of information is the source of information and who is conveying it. Generally, in a health emergency situation people would believe the information which medical practitioners pass on to them. But with respect to the Covid-induced health emergency, which has baffled top rated medical professionals, general medical practitioners, whether they are specialists or super specialists in their own medical stream, doesn’t qualify to comment and recommend their own way of response to the disease. Even if they borrow established guidelines rolled out by the World Health Organization (WHO) or any other global organization mandated to prescribe precautionary measures against the Covid-19 infection, they should ethically quote the source and not put them as their own prescription.
It’s worth mentioning that the uncontrolled and expanding misinformation campaign unleashed by the breed of self-styled ‘Covid experts’ forced U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to call it a “pandemic of misinformation.”
Meanwhile, the pandemic of misinformation seems to have gone unnoticed in government circles. Otherwise, dissemination of such a bad information campaign which has huge tendency to wreak havoc with mental health of the general public, is unnoticeably derailing the organized efforts of the government machinery to contain the further damage caused by this highly contagious virus.
While navigating various portals for facts about the subject – misinformation campaigns about Covid-19 unleashed on social media and other platforms, I came across a stunning piece of information disclosed in a recent research. “In the first 3 months of 2020, nearly 6 000 people around the globe were hospitalized because of coronavirus misinformation,” reads the recent research. During this period, researchers say at least 800 people may have died due to misinformation related to COVID-19. Notably, the World Health Organization (WHO) has termed the death due to misinformation as infodemic – an overabundance of information — some accurate, some not — that spreads alongside a disease outbreak.
Here it’s worth to reproduce the statement about Covid related misinformation and disinformation campaigns on social media given by a Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication, Kasisomayajula Viswanath, at the Harvad T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He said, “Misinformation could be an honest mistake or the intentions are not to blatantly mislead people like advising others to eat garlic or gargle with salt water as protection against COVID-19. Disinformation campaigns, usually propagated for political gain by state actors, party operatives, or activists, deliberately spread falsehoods or create fake content, like a video purporting to show the Chinese government executing residents in Wuhan with COVID-19 or “Plandemic,” a film claiming the pandemic is a ruse to coerce mass vaccinations, which most major social media platforms recently banned.”
In order to be effective, especially during a crisis, public health communicators have to be seen as credible, transparent, and trustworthy. And there, officials are falling short, said Viswanath.
Today, the uncontrolled misinformation campaigns have left people hungry for information based on sureness. There is a lack of consensus-oriented information and everything they come across about the behavior of the virus and the ‘authentic’ measures, which lack uniformity, suggested by the self-styled “Covid experts’ is being contested in public. This scenario has only helped to create confusion among people, who are otherwise hungry for credible guidance to fight the virus out.
So what is to be done to get rid of Covid-related misinformation campaigns, which WHO has termed ‘infodemics’. It’s not possible for the government agencies to hunt and debunk every pasrt of misinformation campaigns. In that case, there is possibility that such an act would lend some credibility to such distortions.
There is need to put in place some effective communication surveillance mechanism to monitor social media posts broadcasting rumors, ideas, issues worrying the public, what is understood and misunderstood about the diseases and treatments, and what myths are circulating or being actively promoted in the community. Accordingly, a strategy is to be tailored and put in place to counter such misinformation campaigns. It’s obvious that such campaigns are most difficult to control when it comes to social media platforms, but at least an effort can be rolled out to manage tuning down the flow of bad information. It’s a challenge to the proven health measures.
Actually, past trends show that misinformation campaigns turn out a breeding ground for uncertain environment. This is what has actually happened in the ongoing Covid crisis. Uncertainty looms large at the back of uncontrolled bad information campaigns. There is fear and anxiety among people as they are continuously hit by contrasting information about the pandemic and its bahviour in the coming times. It has shaken the public trust in healthcare system, which otherwise, according to Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, is essential for fight against the disease like COVID-19.
Let me conclude with the most important and timely statement of the WHO Director General on ‘infodemics’: “Finding solutions to the infodemic is as vital for saving lives from COVID-19 as public health measures, like mask-wearing and hand hygiene, to equitable access to vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.”
Last but not the least, the public too has a responsibility to save themselves from falling victim to misinformation campaigns run on social media platforms about the virus. Let them be watchful about the content they come across about anything labeled as ‘latest’ about COVID-19 research. It would one of the steps to save themselves from the clutches of ‘infodemics’.
(The views are of the author & not the institution he works for)