Falsehood And Half-Truths Can Spread Like COVID-19

Is there anything a regular person can do to contain the spread? Not about coronavirus, misinformation and half-truths.

Recently, social media and news aggregator sites are spewing stories about "healthy, strong and active individuals contracting and dying from COVID-19". It is important not to exaggerate the reach of such stories, but they are too popular for comfort.

These news articles are smeared around the information ecosystem by a combination of fear, a mistaken desire to help, the gossip instinct and, perhaps most important, a belief that official sources aren't telling us the truth.

For instance, Yahoo has regularly published and posted stories like these:

• "'Healthy, Strong’ Baseball Coach, 30, Dies Of COVID-19 After Leaving Hospital"
• "A healthy British woman, 21, has tragically died from coronavirus"
• "Brooklyn High School Principal, 36, Dies from Coronavirus" (She was a healthy, vibrant, energetic 36-year-old woman who had one of the toughest jobs anybody could have, and she did it with resilience"
• "A 12-year-old coronavirus patient 'fighting for her life' had no preexisting conditions, her family said"
• "A 39-year-old otherwise healthy New Orleans woman who showed signs of the novel coronavirus died alone in her kitchen awaiting test results"
• "I never had a fever': McGill student recovering from COVID-19 describes her ordeal"
• "Then Mark Frilot — 45 years old, 'never, ever sick,' came home with a fever"
• "A 39-year-old woman, who is said to have been otherwise healthy"
• "Coronavirus Ravages 7 Members of a Single Family, Killing 4"

They are just a small sample of the questionable articles with incomplete details circulating on this topic. Sometimes they are an attempt to get clicks and thus revenue; sometimes it is deliberate disinformation designed to skew political debate or drown out the truth; sometimes untrue ideas are just catchy.

Can we contain all this misinformation any more than we are containing the new coronavirus?