The World Health Organization and the World Federation of Scientific Journalists held today, Thursday, a joint virtual conference entitled "How do you follow, record and cover the changing science and data in the time of the pandemic?"

At the beginning of the conference - in which Al-Jazeera Net participated - WHO Director-General Tidros Adhanum Gebresos welcomed the participants, and said that scientific journalists are a bridge to communicate information to the general public, and he said that Covid-19 is an example of science constantly changing our knowledge.

For her part, Director of the Department of Epidemiology at the World Health Organization, Dr. Sylvie Briand, said that we always see the spread of misinformation when a disease appears.

She added that perhaps in the past in the Middle Ages the spread of this false news and information was slower, because it was transmitted from one person to another, but today it has become faster with social media in all parts of the world.

Confirm the information

"Part of our work is developing science of ascertaining information, understanding the mechanisms of working wrong information, and developing mechanisms of intervention to address it," Briand said.

She explained that one of the ways to address misinformation is to increase information useful to the population, such as the work of the Communication Department at the World Health Organization, and also by working with social media platforms.

Vera Novice of the World Federation of Scientific Journalists said that the scientific press faces some difficulties, such as other journalists, from violations of their freedom to express opinions and arbitrary pressures, yet they continue their work.

"We work - as scientific journalists - to reach (real) experts, not fake experts. And scientific journalists find it difficult, because many of them work for their own account and are not in major media organizations."

Cautious optimism

"We are working and governments are taking measures to reduce the risk of infection, and people are working to protect themselves, and all this has an impact. We are working to develop vaccines and treatments, and we can be optimistic, but with caution," said Dr. Sumaya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the World Health Organization.

"We are learning a lot from Covid-19 patients, and we expect that many patients will get immunity, but we don't know how long it will last, we are conducting studies of that," said Dr. Maria Van Kirov, an epidemiologist of infectious diseases from the World Health Organization.

She explained that the term "herd immunity" is discussed within the context of vaccines, but with regard to Covid-19, it is not a strategy that WHO recommends.

Herd immunity is a concept that means that if you have a new disease such as Covid-19, and it does not have a vaccine, then it will spread among the population, but if enough people develop an immune memory, the disease will stop spreading, even if not all of the population has developed an immune memory.

When the immune system is exposed to a new enemy - a virus, for example - it deals with it, and if a person lives and recovers, the immune system develops a memory for this invader, so that if it is exposed to the virus in the future, it can fight it easily.

Universal closure

Kirov said that they hope that the Corona pandemic will be an opportunity to mobilize investments in the health sector, and considered that the economic, social and psychological impact during the imposition of the comprehensive closure caused many losses.

"Just to clarify the matter, we do not recommend the use of a procedure such as a comprehensive closure. A comprehensive closure is a term that we do not use in the World Health Organization. On the other hand, we are talking about social measures, and there are many other interventions (to deal with corona)."

She added that the question is how to achieve balance while reducing the impact on social and economic life? How do we move forward now and how do we work without having to impose a comprehensive closure? And she explained that the imposition of this measure (comprehensive closure) in many countries was due to the fact that her capabilities were under pressure, and she needed time to prepare, such as providing beds in hospitals.

"We hope that during this period we have worked to develop the infrastructure so that we do not have to impose a comprehensive closure again to deal with Covid-19," she said.