On Jan. 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a state of global health emergency due to the rising number of confirmed coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in different countries all over the world. As of writing, a total of 85,182 cases were already recorded by the Johns Hopkins case tracker, with more than 79,000 or 93 percent of these coming from Mainland China alone.
However, it was not only the disease that went viral. The propagation of the COVID-19, according to the WHO, came with “massive infodemic:” the spread of abundant content and information — usually disseminated online — which are sometimes true, but are mostly deceitful or misleading, and are ultimately aiming to spur panic from the public.
Infodemic thrives in an environment where people, influenced by their personal biases, readily believe and share unverified information they get both online and offline.
Watch the video below to find out more about it.
VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Fighting an ‘infodemic’ as vicious as the COVID-19 outbreak from VERA Files on Vimeo.
(Guided by the code of principles of
the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, VERA Files tracks
the false claims, flip-flops, misleading statements of public officials
and figures, and debunks them with factual evidence.
Find out more about this initiative and our methodology.)
