Tracking the spread of coronavirus disinformation

The amount of energy needed to refute the lies and conspiracies is an order of magnitude greater than the energy required to produce it, writes Gregory Green. That’s why it’s so rife

Donald Trump speaks to reporters after a meeting of the coronavirus task force in April (Getty)

While the speed of the global spread of coronavirus has been dizzying, another and just as surprising element of this pandemic has been the speed with which public narratives around it have evolved. Those narratives have often included disinformation, spread easily by public panic, but sometimes encouraged by normally reputable sources of information. While coronavirus can be spread by droplets and contact with contaminated objects, disinformation has a much faster transmission route – electronic media.

It was in the last days of December 2019 that rumours of a new virus began to spread on Chinese social media. Had Sars – the deadly virus that infected more than 8,000 people by the end of the 2002-03 epidemic and then disappeared without a trace – resurfaced? When the first official statements from the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee and the World Health Organisation (WHO) came out, on 31 December, few in the west took notice. A few flu enthusiasts chattered excitedly on the online FluTrackers forum.

The Avian Flu Diary speculated that the new virus could be a coronavirus, and noted that the upcoming Spring Festival holiday in China – a time when hundreds of millions of people in China travel home to be with family – would be an opportunity for the virus to spread more widely. At the University of Minnesota, the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy noted the outbreak in its news scan. The German virologist Christian Drosten – who in 2003 developed the first diagnostic test for Sars – heard about the outbreak the next day, from a member of his lab who had caught wind of it on Twitter.