I’m a member of my town’s CERT chapter. One of the priorities of our team leadership has been countering the misinformation and conspiracy theories that are circulating. These days, it’s a noble ambition: I myself have heard the most crackpot utterances from people whom I otherwise consider to be sane and rational human beings. If we’re going to get through this, it’s because we washed our hands, not because we derailed trains into 5G towers.
So to that end, here’s a quick list of articles useful in debunking those folks in your life who’ve taken one too many bong hits around the lava lamp.
No, people are not hoarding toilet paper. The disappearance of TP from store shelves is due to more of it being used at home than at work. Commercial TP is a very different product than consumer TP and cannot easily be repurposed for home use. [Marker]
No, COVID-19 is a not an engineered bioweapon. Analysis of the spikes on the coronavirus has shown they’re so effective at penetrating human cells that their intentional creation is beyond modern technology — only Mother Nature is capable of it. COVID-19 is very similar to viruses that infect bats and pangolins, and it probably passed to humans through an unknown third-party vector. [Forbes]
No, we can’t just isolate the elderly or vulnerable. Not only is it logistically impossible, but concentrating at-risk populations would just make it easier for a contagion like COVID-19 to burn through them. Also, the fact that seniors and people with existing ailments are usually cared for by younger, healthier people makes strict isolation unworkable. [Washington Post]
No, it’s not too late for social distancing. This particularly irrational theory posits that because we didn’t begin social distancing back in January, it doesn’t matter what we do now and therefore the disease should take its natural course. The incubation stage for COVID-19 is 2 to 14 days and a carrier infects an average (the R0) of 2 to 2.5 people 5 to 6 people (updated by the CDC). If you can’t figure out that math, I can’t help you. So yes, regardless of what happened months ago, what we do right now has a large effect on how quickly we get through this and how many wind up dead. [CDC, Business Insider]
Update, 8 April: After further reading, I now realize the above is part of a bigger misrepresentation which supposes that COVID-19 has been present in the United States for months and therefore has largely saturated the population, and because a majority of people are asymptomatic, social distancing and quarantines are pointless since most of us already have the virus. If this was true, however, we would expect to see antibodies present in a majority of the populace, which we’re not finding. Complicating matters is a new study out of Shanghai that counted low levels or even no levels of antibodies in recovered patients, suggesting they could be re-infected. Update, 9 April: The Shanghai study looked for an unreliable marker. Other studies searching for better markers suggest a strong presence of antibodies in recovered patients.
No, Lamont did not lie about an infant dying of COVID-19. During one of his daily press conferences last week, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont stated that a six-week-old infant in the Hartford area died of the virus. This may or may not be true: the unresponsive infant was brought to a hospital, where he/she died. Currently, anyone dying in a hospital is tested for COVID-19 and the infant tested positive. Was it causation or coincidence? We won’t know until the medical examiner announces the autopsy results, but if we don’t assume that all deaths of positive people were caused by the virus, then we risk under-reporting the number of deaths and throwing off calculations of the disease’s mortality rate (among other things). Some anti-vaxxers/pandemic disbelievers, spurred by conspiracy theorist and all-around wingnut Candace Owens, have accused Lamont of lying about the death in an attempt to scare the public, introduce Communism, establish UN concentration camps, etc. While announcing the infant’s death by COVID-19 may have been premature, there’s zero evidence that Lamont or other officials lied or misled the public. Until the autopsy results contradict the cause of death, the infant is being tallied as a casualty of the virus. [Hartford Courant]
