If you’re scrolling through Facebook or Twitter and see an article promising a cure for coronavirus, don’t believe what you see.
To date, there is no approved treatment for coronavirus, which has infected more than 89,000 people around the globe and killed more than 3,000. (There have been no confirmed cases in the D.C. area.)
“So anything you see that says it cures coronavirus is false,” said Dr. Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, during a webcast Monday hosted by the school’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Sell previously studied the flood of misleading information that circulated on social media during the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Researchers examined tweets that mentioned Ebola and found 10% of them had misinformation or half-true information, Sell said. A key trend was that a lot of the misinformation came with a political spin, she said.
“We saw a lot of rumors about government conspiracies,” Sell said.
That trend is repeating itself with coronavirus.
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Rumors and conspiracy theories about the origins of coronavirus — which first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December — are also running rampant. One of the misleading stories making the rounds claims the virus originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.
“That’s misinformation,” Sell said.
“The interesting thing about this misinformation is that if you go to a different country, it blames a different country,” she said. “So, this is a coordinated effort to sow discord and division when we need to have cooperation the most.”
Though the stories are bogus, they can have real effects.
“People can go waste their money. People can think they’re protected when they’re not protected and take risky actions that they shouldn’t be taking,” Sell said. “And sometimes these ‘cures’ actually will harm people themselves.”
So where you can go for reliable information?
Stick with reputable sources, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. The WHO website includes a section on “mythbusting” to clear up some of the misinformation circulating online.
So, despite what you may have read, there is no evidence eating garlic, regularly rinsing your nose with saline or spraying chlorine all over your body can prevent coronavirus infections. And in case you were wondering, it is safe to receive packages and letters from China, because coronaviruses do not survive long on objects.
“I think the thing that is most important is that people need to be thoughtful about what they’re reading on the internet and consider, ‘Is this true or not?’ And not just take it as automatic,” Sell said.
Putting bogus information aside, headlines from even reputable news outlets can cause concern. The key is not to panic, experts said. For example, as testing capacity expands, it’s likely the number of infected patients in the U.S. will grow, perhaps even dramatically.
“Those new cases may expand sort of very quickly as our testing capacity expands — but they were always there,” Sell said. “It’s not that we’re having this explosion in our country. It’s that we’re finding the cases that are there.”
Sell is set to testify about coronavirus misinformation before the House Science and Technology Committee Thursday.
