Covid infodemia: under control of the two pandemics

It is not just one pandemic that we are currently facing, in fact there are two parallel ones - this is what scientists, including the World Health Organization WHO, pointed out in a comment in

magazine last week

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Not only does the SARS-CoV-2 virus have a firm grip on the world, we are also witnessing an information pandemic, or infodemic for short.

This term is not new.

It had already emerged in 2003 in the context of the SARS epidemic to describe how facts, combined with fears, speculations and rumors and reinforced by modern information technologies, achieve a global political and economic influence that is largely disconnected from its factual origins.

Sibylle Anderl

Editor in the features section.

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The term has experienced a renaissance since the appearance of SARS-CoV-2. The epidemic spread of information of dubious quality on social media actually follows very similar laws as the spread of the virus - it is no coincidence that they also speak of “viral content”. Last year, for example, Italian scientists followed this on various online social platforms - Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Reddit and Gab - for the first weeks of the pandemic from January to mid-February 2020. They described the daily number of people who posted articles on the subject of Covid using epidemiological models. In the

they presented their results in October 2020: All platforms examined showed reproduction numbers greater than one.

The subject has grown exponentially across the board.

There were clear differences between the media platforms in the relative proportion of reliable information sources to sources of disinformation.

Mainstream platforms such as Youtube or Twitter performed better here than the little regulated service Gab, for example.

Analysis of Twitter messages

Another Italian research group noted that this proportion changes over time based on an analysis of 100 million Twitter messages between the end of January and mid-March 2020. According to this, waves of unreliable pandemic information followed the rise in the number of Covid in many countries -19 infections each advance. The more dramatic the infection situation became, the more people turned to reliable sources such as recognized experts or large media companies. The Italian scientists also used a risk index for different countries to analyze the rate at which a network user was exposed to unreliable information. Among the G-8 countries, they diagnosed a high infodemic risk, especially for Germany and Russia.

The interaction between pandemic and infodemic is now also addressed by the scientists working with Walter Quattrociocchi in their "Cell" comment.

The information received on social media will ultimately determine how people behave, and that in turn will determine the course of the pandemic.

The prevention paradox plays just as much a role here as the infodemic undermining of trust in institutions, which runs counter to the implementation of measures in the fight against the pandemic.

“The dovetailing of infodemies and pandemics is one of the most critical areas of future studies to improve the preparedness and health of the world's population,” the researchers conclude.

This requires an interdisciplinary effort and the development of suitable communication concepts.