FUNNY WORDS FOR PANDEMIC UPDATE

“When the president says disinfectants … or anti-malaria drugs are one way to treat COVID-19, and other people say, ‘No, that’s not the case,’ the public is hard-pressed to start wondering, ‘If the authorities cannot agree, cannot make up their minds, why should I trust anybody?’” “People are hungry for information, hungry for certitude, and when there is a lack of consensus-oriented information and when everything is being contested in public, that creates confusion among people,” he said. And there, officials are falling short, said Viswanath. In order to be effective, especially during a crisis, public health communicators have to be seen as credible, transparent, and trustworthy. 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. “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, he said. The sheer volume of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation online is “crowding out” the accurate public health guidance, “making our work a bit more difficult,” he said. It’s disseminating and even creating them, which is a “very different” dynamic than what took place during prior pandemics MERS and H1N1. Chan School of Public Health, said the popularity and ubiquity of the various platforms means the public is no longer merely passively consuming inaccuracies and falsehoods. Kasisomayajula “Vish” Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication at the Harvard T.H.

What distinguishes the proliferation of bad information surrounding the current crisis, though, is social media. Secretary-General António Guterres last week called a “pandemic of misinformation,” a phenomenon that has not gone unnoticed as nearly two-thirds of Americans said they have seen news and information about the disease that seemed completely made up, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. The sudden onset of a new, highly contagious coronavirus has unleashed what U.N. When a disease outbreak grabs the public’s attention, formal recommendations from medical experts are often muffled by a barrage of half-baked advice, sketchy remedies, and misguided theories that circulate as anxious people rush to understand a new health risk.

FUNNY WORDS FOR PANDEMIC UPDATE

This is part of our Coronavirus Update series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.

Funny words for pandemic