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5A Few Observations Upon COVID-19 Media Coverage Myths
Konstantin S. Sharov1
Konstantin S. Sharov,
PhD,
Senior Lecturer, Moscow State University, Senior Researcher,
N. K. Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology, Russia
Article No / Номеръ статьи: 010640018
For citation (Chicago style) / Для цитировашя (стиль «Чикаго»):
Sharov, Konstantin. 2020. "A Few Observations Upon COVID-19 Media Coverage Myths" The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions 3, 010640018.
Versions in different languages available online: English only.
1 Please send the correspondence to e-mail: const.sharov@mail.ru.
010640018-1
Permanent URL links to the article:
HANDLE: 20.500.12656/thebeacon.3.010640018
http://thebeacon.ru/pdf/Vol.%203.%20Issue%201.%20010640018%20ENG.pdf
Received in the original form: 1 April 2020 Review cycles: 2
1st review cycle ready: 4 May 2020 Review outcome: 3 of 3 positive Decision: To publish with minor revisions 2nd review cycle ready: 12 May 2020 Accepted: 20 May 2020 Published online: 21 May 2020
ABSTRACT
Konstantin 5. Sharov. A few observations upon COVID-19 media coverage myths. WHO metrics on COVID-19 spread and consequences "Confirmed cases" and "Confirmed deaths" are highly deceptive. They delude not only the general public, but, what is more dangerous, leading world politicians. Their wrong coverage by mass media provokes unseen quarantine and self-isolation measures around the world, that may threaten the world economy and social order. A more comprehensive approach to withstanding the ideology of the Doomsday, is proposed in the article.
Key words: COVID-19, 5AR5-CoV-2, coronavirus pandemic, media myths, Internet, infodemic, fake news, false news, informational panic, globalisation
INTRODUCTION
By the beginning of April 2020, most of the media myths related to COVID-19 disease, have already became almost truly universal. They are widely accepted and disseminated throughout the global society by global, national and regional mass media, in different regions, cultures and countries. In their totality, they form the global apocalyptic ideology transmitted via media and based on unproven assumptions and personal opinions about the virus.
Douglas Mark Rushkoff introduced a concept of media virus in his 1994 book Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (Rushkoff 1994). "Official" news of information agencies, ideological tales, political technologies, all these can become an informational "RNA" for media viruses that penetrate our social system, multiply there and sometimes cause catastrophic results. The current situation with the SARS-CoV-2 spread across the world, is by no means different from what Rushkoff described in details at the time when globalisation was no more than a simple word whose meaning was fully grasped by only a few futurists and fiction writers.
Taking this into account, we cannot be surprised by the fact that nowadays there are two levels of infection: SARS-CoV-2 itself that influences human organism and its media representation ("replicas") affecting our social systems at national and international levels. Moreover, different myths based on wrong interpretation of current information on the virus, are strongly connected with each other. In mass media and political discourse they amplify each other.
World Health Organisation (WHO) is also partially responsible for creating a distorted picture of SARS-CoV-2 spread across the world and its epidemiological properties. In spite of WHO has a special webpage "Mythbusters," where myths about COVID-19 are deemed to be contained (WHO 2020a), the organisation provides a real-time information on COVID-19 disease, reduced just to two indicators, "Confirmed cases" and "Confirmed deaths" (WHO 2020b; 2020c). The third metric "Number of countries infected" seems to have little sense at all, as a priori one can anticipate that a virus with droplet transmission that was not contained at its very source of the first outbreak, will finally be found in almost any country (Flahaut and Zylberman 2010; Imran et al. 2016).
In our paper, we shall demonstrate dubiousness and ambivalence of such an approach. That mode of media coverage was one of the main causes of media panic ("infodemic," or a sort of media psychosis comparable with psychosis of permanent-war state (Hedges 2014; Leiviska Deland et al. 2011)) in journalist circles and social networks on a global scale that beguiled and continue to beguile most of leading world politicians. Having observed the obviously wrong interpretation of WHO online metrics data in February-March 2020 and its social consequences, WHO representatives do not do anything to stop panic or explain to politicians, administrative officials and local healthcare organisations the real meaning of the statistics provided by WHO.
The first cause and the last effect of global myth spread are explained by the re-assessment of what we can regard as epidemiologic and medical information, including medical statistics. The quality of information on COVID-19 is almost inversely proportional to its quantity, as it is usually with notable social issues media coverage (Ambagtsheer et al. 1983), while its quantity is nearly limitless in the situation of social networks dominance and personal blogs persistence.
THE RADICAL CHANGE OF INFORMATION STATUS IN THE GLOBALLY
NETWORKED SOCIETY
In the past - even very recent past when the world faced the SARS pandemic in 2002-2004 with its peak in 2003 - humanity tended to regard scientific research and confirmed medical statistics as the only true information sources.
Now it is not the case. Personal opinions of bloggers, house wives, yesterday's schoolchildren, immature journalists, "owners" of a great number of network "followers" and "friends" ("gravitation points" of social networks), all of them are now perceived as "expert views." In the globally networked human society, there is approximately limitless number of information "producers" as well as information "consumers." That blurs the information coverage of COVID-19 prodigiously. Furthermore, the "chain reaction" of media viruses spread through social networks, results in exponential growth of people contaminated with media panic.
Indeed, almost all of us, representatives of the global Earth population with an access to the Internet, if we are not scientists or doctors involved in the containment or prevention procedures, deal not with SARS-CoV-2 virions, but with their media representations in the space of ideas. The deplorable results of treating personal "opinions" and private views as legitimate information resources, are mass panic, infodemic, social disorder, diminishment of social responsibility, anomy, increased social aggressiveness, political and administrative misuse, etc. (Burt 2001; Coiera 2013; Videras 2013).
DEFICIENCIES OF ONLINE STATISTICS ON VIRUS SPREAD
One of the most unexpected sources of COVID-19 myths is World Health Organisation official statistics. WHO's two main metrics are "Confirmed cases" and "Confirmed deaths." Let us consider in detail which myths can be generated by media on the basis of the official statistics.
The official statistics provided by WHO, affiliated agencies and news makers, can be by and large deeply misleading. For all pandemics of the past, even SARS outbreak of 2002-2004, the statistics was calculated offline and post factum, i.e. it was mainly determined after a considerable number of patients were treated. Now we have to deal with "online" COVID-19 statistics, with the numbers of cases, death toll etc. changing precisely on our PC and smartphone screens in the real-time mode. Such an approach generates poor quality of reported information. No checks and double-checks are made, and the figures are uploaded to information servers in 24x7 mode - official servers were overloaded more than fifty times during period 1-4 April 2020 due to the tremendous number of users that would have liked to watch the figures online. The "temptation of the online" seems to affect all sides of our life and be partially explained by a psychological deficiency syndrome of the
modern society. The addiction to the online is largely connected with visualisation and networking syndromes.
Nowadays everybody would like to post or observe everything "in real time." US President Barack Obama watched eliminating Osama bin Laden in real time. IS2 terrorists executed their victims online and translate their crimes in real-time mode over the Internet. Many Internet websites provide the information about world population growth , births and deaths in real time. Some websites try to report road accident death toll rate in real time. Life and death became phenomena visualised online in real-time mode.
WHO and news agencies provide an opportunity to witness "spread" and "lethality" of SARS-CoV-2 virus by the cost of lowering quality and almost complete absence of the check of the numbers provided. Finally, the figures of WHO metrics on the infection rate migrate to millions of personal accounts in Instagram, Facebook, Weibo, WeChat and other social networks.
The current situation with COVID-19 is the first case in the history of human society when mass media and global networks "allow" us - to be more exact, make us - watch the counters of those who are getting infectious and who die in real time, with these counters being supposed to demonstrate the "real" rate of SARS-CoV-2 spread across the world to us. However, the figures shown by the "real-time" counters may be highly deceptive. They are called to be the trumpets of the Doomsday by the ideological apparatuses, nothing less. Dimitri Simes stressed that "you cannot be easy and relaxed when you see in real time how your neighbour die" (Simes 2020). Our psychological need in brotherhood, our compassion and conscience are precisely the targets at which the ideology of real-time openness is aimed. It causes infodemic and even greater panic among the population.
How can the official figures be misleading? Note, the statistics is exact in itself, it is not false or feigned, but it causes great and almost universal misunderstanding by general audience, journalists, public figures and politicians. Let us turn to the online calculators.
THE NUMBER OF THE INFECTED
WHO has the "Confirmed cases" metric3 that almost all people regard as a more or less precise indicator of the infected (from the beginning of the pandemic or during a definite period of time). That understanding of the metric is disseminated via all major news agencies such as CNN, Fox News, BBC, Daily Telegraph, Deutsche Welle, as well as Russian, Chinese, Middle East TV channels, to say nothing of personal blogs and other private "information resources." But that metric does not at all reflect the real number of
2 IS is a terrorist organization whose activity is legally forbidden in Russia.
3 See: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd; https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus;
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019, etc.
the infected people. Period. This metric does not show the number of the carriers ("people who got ill", in mass media terms4). The faster the humanity will understand that, the faster the public panic will be deadened. In reality, WHO reports the number of people that were proved to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 after RT-PCR5 analysis done. The test is generally made on the patients' sputum (Hase et al. 2020; Sivakorn et al. 2020). There is one thing that all of us should take into account: the real number of infected persons is much greater than "Confirmed cases" metric figures. Some estimations based upon the statistics of SARS, H5N1, H1N1, Ebola haemorrhagic fever and several other virus-caused diseases of the last two decades allow us to speculate that the number of infected may be up to two orders higher than the number of "confirmed cases" (based on: Gumbert et al. 2020; Sahoo et al. 2019; Tang et al. 2020).
Is it a "good" or "bad" news for humanity? Despite it sounds horrible, in reality it is definitely a positive observation for us all. It indicates at least the following:
1) the pandemic will be "finished" - I avoid saying "curbed" - sooner;
2) real fatality rate is much lower;
3) the immune stratum is being formed with larger number of symptomless carriers.
For example, some mathematical assumptions based on the statistical models say that
for 1 April 2020 in Italy (one of the most affected countries) there may have been at least ten times more infected and recovered in total than the number of "confirmed cases" (Carenzo et al. 2020; Carret 2020; Onder et al. 2020) i.e. persons who are carriers and transmitters of SARS-CoV-2 virus and people who already have antibodies to the virus in their blood. The official statistics was around 120,000 reported cases for that time. The infected people not included in the statistics of "confirmed cases," may have had
- a completely symptomless disease behaviour,
- a clinical course with mild symptoms, or
- they may have already recovered from the illness.
All that may reduce the true fatality rate at least one order below the percentage calculated "in real time." The Italian figures that are beyond any understanding now, may shrink from 12 per cent (case mortality rate) to some 1 per cent (fatality rate), if they are recalculated on the basis of the total virus carriers, not just confirmed cases. The discrepancy between case mortality rate and true fatality rate is constantly emphasised by different authors in scientific periodicals. That was the main source of misunderstanding statistical figures of H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010.
In which way can we achieve a more reasonable statistics? In fact, it can be done in the same manner as a sociological survey is usually made. After choosing an appropriate scale (a house, condominium, district, or an organisation, working building, etc.), all persons - I
4 Almost any news agency starts its TV broadcast with a statement like "Today in our country N people caught the COVID-19 infection." This is highly delusive. They must say "Today in our country tests of N additional people proved that they have COVID-19 infection." The semantic difference is obvious.
5 Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction.
would like to stress it, each and every person within that object - should be tested for SARS-CoV-2 and/or antibodies to it. Only such comprehensive a test shall give us the full and unbiased understanding of the virus spread, devoid of any ideological influence. Besides, only a set of such tests made on objects of different types can give the picture of professional and population profiles of the virus spread.
No such comprehensive sets of tests have been made thus far in any country, and that distorts the picture of virus transmission any of us draws in our own consciousness. None the less, the situation is slightly clarified by the outcome of a few total tests made in several medical institutions, both in Russia and abroad. Such mass testing within medical organisation reveals that the ratio of carriers number to reported cases number is around 10, while only around 15-18 per cent of all infected have severe atypical pneumonia symptoms of different difficulty, and nearly one quarter of the infected have no symptoms at all.
That observation is not widely covered in mass media. Perhaps, a reason for it consists in the fact that clarifying the picture does not correspond to the ideology of the Doomsday many politicians, financiers and reporters are profiting now from. Demonstrating "online" death toll figures, videos of chosen cases of people's sufferings abandoned in hospitals without due medical help, tears of those who lost their relatives, are much more profitable for gaining political points, Instagram "likes," journalist cheap fame and other benefits of the global network society, whatever preposterous, sordid and ignoble it may seem to a reasonable person.
To sum up, few people guess that the first derivative of the number of confirmed cases, i.e.. the "speed of virus walking across the Earth" reflects the speed of setting up the RT-PCR test systems, not the real rate of virus spread. In fact, the common situation is that the virus has reached the area being tested much earlier and infected much more people.
Leading world politicians should finally realise that uncritical considering "Confirmed cases" WHO metric as a reliable indicator of SARS-CoV-2 spread around the Earth shall lead only to prolonging quarantine and self-isolation regimes for several months, possibly a year or two years - it is the average timeline for a virus with droplet transmission form the population block immunity. In turn, such prolongation of quarantine mode of life with additional curfews and martial law zones already established in some areas, will inevitably result in the crash of major economies, civil wars, social unrest and revolutions on a scale of the whole planet. The politicians must switch from being another social actors disseminating panic to dependable persons the population of their countries may rely on. They have no other way than to start to listen to expert judgement of renowned microbiologists, virologists, epidemiologists and ecologists, not "opinions" of Instagram users.
WHO's approach to online visualisation of its deceptive metrics is also highly blameful. "Confirmed cases" counter will not stop to tick until either nearly two thirds of the world population is proven to have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in their blood - it is so-called block population immunity - or the mutual political will has stopped squandering billions in vain. For 4 April 2020 the value of "Confirmed cases" counter was 1,000,000 cases. So, do we
have to wait until it is 5,500,000,000 human beings? Let me reiterate, this metric does not reflect the real number of the infected!
THE NUMBER OF DEATHS
Perhaps, if the WHO metric "Confirmed cases" is mainly misleading and causes wrong conclusions and implications, the metric of "Confirmed deaths" shows us a more realistic picture? Once again, no. But what can be wrong with it?
The "Confirmed deaths" metric is also very deceptive. Its title hints that medical workers should confirm the death of a patient due to SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here comes the uncertainty.
SARS-CoV-2, as well as its closest genetic relation SARS-CoV that caused the 2002-2004 atypical pneumonia outbreak, and unlike Ebola or Nipah viruses, does not kill people. In Ebola, Dengue, Yellow fevers or Nipah cases, virus proliferations in a human organism directly lead to organ malfunction, internal bleeding, etc. in a very short time (hours to a few days). The symptomatic picture is almost universal, with very few deviations.
In COVID-19 clinical course, complications may result in someone's death. The most dangerous complication in SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV cases, is "atypical" pneumonia, i.e. pneumonia with different clinical course than pneumococcus, streptococcus or any other bacterial-caused pneumonia (Anonymous n.d.). Unlike Ebola, Dengue, Yellow fevers or Nipah which lead to acute and almost identical symptoms of almost all infected people, symptoms of COVID-19-induced atypical pneumonia are characteristic only for a small fraction of infected, with the symptomatic deviation being huge, from a completely asymptomatic course to a very dangerous state to life. Usually the people with severe COVID-19 symptoms, represent social risk groups, e.g. the may be aged persons, smokers, people with depressed immune system, HIV carriers, chronic alcohol drinkers, inhabitants of ecologically unfavourable districts (Northern Italy is such a place) etc. This does not mean, however, that a human outside the risk groups cannot get infected - they can and do. We should work with probabilities here, e.g. (numbers are not exact and provided only as possible examples) 60 per cent of persons of 80 years old or more, will get infectious, and 30 per cent of them will have atypical pneumonia symptoms with significance level of 5 per cent; while a 40 year-old person without chronic diseases will "catch" the infection with the probability of 20 per cent with pneumonia cases of 8 per cent with the same significance level. Cannot we feel the difference? An attempt of a comprehensive description of a set of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China, is made in the work of Chen et al. (2020).
A common approach of a media commentator, however, is to tell the audience how many new persons perished of COVID-19 during a given day. The term "to perish" is a synonym of "to be killed at a war or during an accident" and it can by no means be used here. People with COVID-19 diagnosis may die of different causes, sometimes (especially for highly aged persons) even of natural reasons. Only a fraction of the infected deceased people died of pneumonia-like COVID-19 complications thus far.
The Italian and Spanish scenarios are universally taken as a standard to which every country may (and possibly, will) inevitably come. That is a source of deception. To put aside healthcare system considerations, Italy and Spain are countries with unusual social risk profile for mainly social and demographic reasons:
1) largest level of global tourism in the world;
2) enormous level of migration from the Mediterranean, Near and Middle East to Europe;
3) poor ecological situation (for Northern Italy), i.e. severe air pollution concentrated on areas south of the Alps (Croft et al. 2019; European Environment Agency 2020; Martuzzi et al. 2006; cit. by: Bhakdi 2020);
4) on 25 February Italian Ministry of Health adopted statistics gathering policies quite opposite to those that may have clarified the situation, i.e. the policies that prioritised testing for people with severe symptoms and almost cancelled testing for asymptomatic or mild symptomatic people (Rettner 2020). To be sure, that measure also made a large statistical skew towards increase of confirmed cases rate.
WHO statistics does not take all of this into account, since WHO provides just "net value of death toll." With our ideological "treatment" made by TV hosts and Internet news makers, we (and politicians too) start to treat COVID-19 fatality rate as an everyday war death toll communiqué. This is also a source of infodemic and blurring the situation with the coronavirus effects.
Let us stop and make some calculations. Around 16 per cent of the reported cases have atypical pneumonia symptoms, of which only 20 per cent have severe symptoms that require medical ventilation. So, we multiply .16 x .20 and receive .032, i.e. only 3.2 per cent of the reported cases have severe symptoms. That is obviously not 5 per cent of the infected or even of the total population, as mass media psychosis continues to put in our ears regularly from day to day. 5 per cent of the infected will break any healthcare system of the world, nay, the whole world combined healthcare system.
Many politicians paralysed with fear of such a news, started to restructure all their economies to fulfil this need. Of course, additional hospital beds with ventilators should be reserved for an emergency case, but obviously not the number to which these politicians are headed, being seized with fear. It seems that all world economy will soon produce only medical masks and ventilators. However, to make N hospital beds, where N = 5 per cent of the total population, i.e. .05 x 8 bln = 400,000,000, is beyond the economic resources of all developed countries brought together.
Politicians have to clearly see why this figure is delusive. There may be an emergency need (i.e. the figure much above a realistic figure) in P ~ .032 (severe pneumonia-like symptoms to the reported cases ration) x .05 (estimation of reported cases to the infected ratio) x .6 (block immunity) x 8bln = 7.7 mln around the world. This number is high, but it is a priori overcautious. These 7.7 mln will not get infected at one moment. The Gaussian-or Poisson-like form (SIR or SEIR compartment models) of almost any pandemic infection rate along with 2-year timeline of the complete spread of the virus will give approximately 7.7 mln / 730 = 10,500 beds a day for the whole world. But this number is also overcautious
for the following reasons. The number of patients with severe symptoms may be much lower than 7.7 mln, since the virus will infect more mobile persons with larger probability. Healthier and younger people will "catch" the virus first, but they will have an asymptomatic course of the disease with much greater probability. Taking into account young to aged world ratio, mobility factors, and this probability, it may be well near 0.7-1 mln beds in total for a two-year timeline. So, our number diminishes to 1,000-1,500 beds a day on a scale of the world.
Remembering that we deal not with rectangle-like (even number of patients every day, for ventilation need of one day), but with Gaussian (plateau-like patient growth and decay, with the maximum approximately in the middle of the time range) dependency, we make the following iteration with assumption of average need of 15-day ventilation (overcautious) for severe symptomatic patients, average dispersion of 5 days2 (based on statistical data on COVID-19 spread in China and Republic of Korea) and receive nearly 150,000-180,000 beds at the peak of the worldwide spread. However, we may easily exclude China and India from the total computation, since China seems to have already contained the pandemic, while India has taken exclusively strict measures and was one of the first countries to cut the connections with the world. So, 8 bln transform to 8bln - 1.7bln - 1.2 bln = 5.1 bln. Making proportional adjustments, we are obtaining .64 (per cent of the population beyond China and India) x 150,000-180,000 = 96,000-115,000 hospital beds with ventilators that are necessary on a scale of the whole world beyond China and India at the peak of the disease. One country burden should hardly exceed 10,000 beds at the peak of disease (very overcautious - suggesting that all the countries reach the peak simultaneously). 80,000-100,000 beds (reality) vs 400,000,000 (imaginary picture in media myth) beds for the whole world, these are the results of a very overcautious calculation of healthcare capacities needed for the containment of COVD-19.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
According to our research of health behavioural patterns of Russian population in regard to COVID-19 containment, of 1,315 Moscow citizens randomly surveyed, 551 persons (41.9%) believed in conspiracy theories and violated at least one prescription of authorities (Table). 88% of these 551 respondents explained that the main reason for their mistrust in public health interventions and accepting conspiracy theories was irrational Russian government response to the pandemic. 1,024 people (77.9%) found administrative measures taken by Russian government on COVID-19 prevention inconsistent with common sense. Table presents main COVID-19 conspiracy ideas in Russian society and possible sources of their origin, that we revealed in our survey. According to Daniel von Wachter, there should be a distinct distinguishing between 'ungrounded' conspiracy beliefs (e.g., SARS-CoV-2 is a biological weapon) and 'rational' conspiracy beliefs, i.e. the system of ideas and corresponding heath behavioural response of population, where people tried to find
logic in administrative steps taken by authorities in COVID-19 situation and explain them somehow (Von Wachter 2020).
In Russia, a number of persons voluntarily exacerbated their COVID-19 clinical course, even to lethality in some cases, due to their mistrust in public healthcare interventions. But are we to blame these people themselves? We suppose no. Obvious managerial mistakes of many Russian federal and local authorities; opaqueness, inconsistency and insufficiency of epidemiological data on the pandemic, presented in governmental informational resources; and unwillingness of Russian administration to hear people's voices in COVID-19 containment, mainly account for the wax of conspiracy theories in Russian society and consequent harm. Irresponsible administrational attitude led to uncritical thinking of supporters of conspiracy theories and their careless health behaviour. Lack of democracy caused lack of rationality.
CONCLUSIONS
COVID-19 is different from any other pandemics of the past in its "comprehensive" "real-time" mass media coverage. In reality, this coverage turns out to be not at all comprehensive, quite the opposite. The statistical data on the pandemics of the past, from the Black Death of the fourteenth century in England to the "swine" flu H1N1 of 2008-2009 were available to humanity only a posteriori, after the data were checked, double-checked and presented in an appropriate form. Even twelve years ago, with H1N1 virus spread, we did not deal with "online" and "real-time" coverage, not to say about the pandemics of earlier times.
In the past, people had enough time to deliberate on pandemic data and evaluate their significance, usefulness and heuristic importance for the future times. Now everything is different. The humanity seems to have already transformed to a truly global networked society without mental, national or any other borders, without control of information torrents, but with a high degree of uncritical apprehension of "data," "expert opinions" and "news." An "opinion" on COVID-19 of a non-professional blogger in, say, China, influences hundreds of thousands people in England or Germany, causing anomy and apocalyptic moods. That should be stopped at a political level as soon as possible, if we do not wish overturning of the world economy and social order.
With all that taken into account, we can view a more realistic picture of COVID-19 that already turned out to be much less dangerous than it was told us by media myths in January-March 2020.
Conflict of interests: None declared.
Table. Dubious administrative actions/attitudes, COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Russian society and corresponding mistrustful health behavioral responses.
Administrative action/attitude Conspiracy belief Main groups of population that share/support the belief Potential health behavioral response Comment
Putin publicly called SARS-CoV-2 'deadly' several times without any necessary explanations of its 'deadli-ness' All world leaders are aware of artificial coronavirus origin from a laboratory Scientific researchers, academia, university faculty Avoiding wearing individual protective units (masks, gloves, etc.) Technically, any virus is 'deadly,' as there are always fatalities, including for influenza viruses. But having called SARS-CoV-2 'deadly,' Putin demonstrated scientific ignorance. This is the word appropriate for, e.g. Ebola virus with case fatality rate of 90%, not SARS-CoV-2 with case fatality rate 0.9%
Moscow mayor introduced strict control over relocation of citizens since March 25, 2020 with CCTV surveillance of almost every human and car. Car trips are limited to two ones a week. Financial penalties for disobedience. World is transforming to Orwell's 1984 society, 'police state' with total control of citizens and all personal freedoms canceled Working people Intensified social communication with constant relocations Unconstitutional measures by Moscow mayor, direct violation of democracy
Requirement of self-isolation to aged people are much stricter than to younger persons The world governments wishes contractions of budget loads by abridging of aged population that must decease due to side effects of isolation measures Aged people Intensified mobility of aged persons, increased risk for them to contract COVID-19 in grocery stores and during meetings with peers In comparison with USA, in Russia many families live with their aged parents. Stricter self-isolation of aged persons is logical for US, but senseless for Russia
Chloroquine + azithromycin therapy was prescribed coercively to all COVID-19 patients without distinguishing between conditions. Specialized therapy (e.g. antiretroviral therapy) is often suspended Governments wish to curtail world population by poisoning people with potentially dangerous chemicals Hospital patients, those who had COVID-19 disease Rejection to be treated with any medications No clinical trials that would prove or refute Chloroquine + azithromycin effectiveness in COVID-19 cases, were made in Russia. It was just a political will and administrative decision of Ministry
of Health. There are many reasons to believe that serious harm was made to cardiovascular system and liver of a number of patients
Russian official informational resources on COVID-19 statistics are dim and insufficient in quality and amount. No important data are provided There is no such virus at all. It is a hoax Different groups of population Ignoring any medical advices, public health interventions and/or symptoms Statistics must be disclosed in full and brought to, e.g. CDC level
Refusal of medical care institutions, including hospitals, to accept necessary medications, including for HIV patients, as a gift from non-profit organization and other sponsors A plot to curtail ill population Different groups of population Avoiding to be hospitalized Very serious managerial mistake of hospital and other healthcare administration, violating fundamental principles of medical ethics
Media psychosis on official TV channels about virus utmost danger and doomed humanity. Constant searching for geopolitical enemies severely stricken with COVID-19, by official media SARS-CoV-2 does not exist. The story about it was invented by media and supra-governmental forces People accustomed to critical reasoning Ignoring most medical advices, public health interventions and/or symptoms Governmental inability, lack of wish to control COVID-19 informational coverage or benefiting from it. Irresponsibility of media that make additional publicity for themselves and increase their ratings
Closing Christian temples without closing grocery stores World governments are controlled by upcoming anti-Christ forces Religious people or their supporters Ignoring any epi-demiological risk Christianity has very strong support in Russian society. It is unclear why Russian government banned attendance on services with supermarkets open
New criminal offense laws against those who makes publicly available 'disinformation on COVID-19.' Financial penalties or imprisonment for violation. 'Police state' dawn with transition to total digitization of people Religious people or their supporters, political opposition Counteracting government-backed healthcare measures Government appropriated the right to decide what constitutes 'allowable' information that would be lauded and what makes false information that would be punished.
Transition to totalitarianism is obvious.
Strict media censorship. Firing of reporters and media commentators that disagree with official governmental interpretation of COVID-19 information All personal freedoms and/or opinions will soon be appropriated by the state People of art, theater, film circles, scientific researchers, religious people Counteracting government-backed healthcare measures Recent dismissal of the author broadcast of internationally renowned film director Nikita Mikhalkov by TV pro-governmental channel Russia-24 management was outrageous.
Multiple prolongation of quarantine and isolation measures, especially in Moscow, without proving their necessity COVID-19 has nothing to do with this. World leaders have been maturing their plans to totalitarianism for a long time, and now they agreed with each other to implement these plans simultaneously Different groups of population Distrust in any COVID-19 numbers, suspecting lies everywhere Management errors of Russian healthcare system
Compulsory wearing of individual protecting units (masks and gloves) outside, especially in Moscow. Financial penalties for disobedience. This is a plot to enrich individual protective units makers Aged persons, chronically ill persons Ignoring and opposing wearing of individual protecting units, even in premises, when they may be useful Requirement to wear individual protective units outside (on streets) may be not merely senseless, but dangerous due to multiple side effects (sweating in hot times, pulmonary and cardiovascular risks, additional bacteriological infection hazard of a contaminated mask, etc.)
Orders to switch off Russian economy prolonged multiple times, without proving their necessity COVID-19 has nothing to do with this. World governments want mass impoverishment of the majority of people, with enormous enrichment of the world elites from behind the veil Self-employed, businesspersons, those who suffered or lost their businesses Sabotaging any COVID-19 healthcare surveillance measures Actions of Russian government allegedly aimed at saving economy and businesses, turned out to be populist and ineffective. They did not save personal businesses, but increased federal budget loads
New administrative responsibility laws against those who will not accede to a future forced vaccination against COVID-19. Financial penalties for any future disobedience.
Forced transforming people to robots without free will, by means of electronic nanochip-implanting through massive compulsory vaccination
Fundamentalist religious sects representatives
Sabotaging any vaccination efforts
No vaccine is ready, either in Russia or in other countries yet. When a vaccine has been made, it should be pre-clinically and clinically carefully tested before any medical utilization. Only after that one may argue about its
(in)-appropriatenes s for massive vaccination. No vaccination may be compulsory. To discuss bills against future possible opposition to possible vaccination is nonsense and blatant breaching of democracy
Funding. This work was funded by Government program of basic research in Koltzov Institute of Developmental Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences in 2020, no. 0108-2019-0002.
Conflicts of interest. None declared.
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EXTENDED SUMMARY
Sharov, Konstantin S. A Few Observations Upon COVID-19 Media Coverage Myths. The current corona crisis instigated by many wrong attitudes in epidemiological containment of COVID-19, begot a number of social and media myths that direct human understanding to one particular side, i.e. terror and fear of the virus. In the paper, we analyse the peculiarities of mythological (ideological) media coverage of COVID-19 pandemic by world media and World Health Organisation as a media entity.
World Health Organisation (WHO) is partially responsible for creating a distorted picture of SARS-CoV-2 spreading across the world and its boosted epidemiological hazards. In spite of WHO has a special webpage "Mythbusters," where myths about COVID-19 are deemed to be contradicted, the organisation provides a real-time information on COVID-19 disease, reduced just to two indicators, "Confirmed cases" and "Confirmed deaths." The third metric "Number of countries infected" seems to have little sense at all, as a priori one can anticipate that a virus with droplet transmission that was not contained at its very place of its outbreak, will finally be found in almost any country.
In February-March 2020, the Italian and Spanish scenarios were universally taken as a standard to which every country may (and possibly, will) inevitably come. That is a source of deception. To put aside healthcare considerations, Italy and Spain are countries with unusual social risk profile for a number of social and demographic reasons: 1) largest level of global tourism in the world; 2) enormous level of migration from the Mediterranean, Near and Middle East to Europe; 3) poor ecological situation (for Northern Italy), i.e. severe air pollution concentrated on areas south of the Alps; 4) on 25 February Italian Ministry of Health adopted statistics gathering policies quite opposite to those that may have clarified the situation, i.e. the policies that prioritised testing for people with severe symptoms and almost cancelled testing for asymptomatic or mild symptomatic people. To be sure, that measure also made a large statistical skew towards increase of confirmed cases rate.
Wrong attitudes of many governments in containing COVID-19 gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories in population that instigated non-compliance with healthcare public policy measures. However, people are not to blame. Administrative efforts were mainly aimed at "controlling" humans to "protect" them. In reality, this "protection" is nothing more than a "protection" of Big Brother. COVID-19 is different from any other pandemics of the past in its "comprehensive" "real-time" mass media coverage. In reality, this coverage turns out to be not at all comprehensive, quite the opposite. The statistical data on the pandemics of the past, from the Black Death of the fourteenth century in England to the "swine" flu H1N1 of 2008-2009 were available to humanity only a posteriori, after the data were checked, double-checked and presented in an appropriate form. Even twelve years ago, with H1N1 virus spread, we did not deal with "online" and "real-time" coverage, not to say about the pandemics of earlier times.
With all that taken into account, we can create a more realistic picture of COVID-19. It is to remember that the real virus is a something different from all its media "replicas" created within media myths.
Author / ABTopt
Konstantin S. Sharov,
Senior Lecturer, M. V. Moscow State University, Leninkie Gory 12 bld 1, Moscow, 119234, Russia
© Konstantin S. Sharov
Licensee The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions
Licensing the materials published is made according to Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence
