Leveraging media and health communication strategies to overcome the COVID-19 infodemic
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Leveraging media and health communication strategies to overcome the COVID‑19 infodemic Nour Mheidly1 · Jawad Fares2
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a complementary infodemic, whereby various outlets and digital media portals shared false information and unsourced recommendations on health. In addition, journals and authors published a mass of academic articles at a speed that suggests a non-existent or a non-rigorous peer review process. Such lapses can promote false information and adoption of health policies based on misleading data. Reliable information is vital for designing and implementing preventive measures and promoting health awareness in the fight against COVID-19. In the age of social media, information travels wide and fast, emphasizing a need for accurate data to be corroborated swiftly and for preventing misleading information from wide dissemination. Here, we discuss the implications of the COVID-19 infodemic and explore practical ways to leverage health communication strategies to overcome it. We propose the “Infodemic Response Checklist” as a comprehensive tool to overcome the challenges posed by the current and any future infodemics. Keywords COVID-19 · Pandemic · Infodemic · Communication · Social media · Science · Peer review · Infodemic Response Checklist
Introduction Amid the immense rise of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and global spread of the disease, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on 11 March 2020 that this viral disease has become a pandemic [1]. Health authorities around the world have confirmed cases from South East Asia, the Americas, Europe, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1057/s4127 1-020-00247-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jawad Fares [email protected] 1
Faculty of Information, Lebanese University, Beirut, Lebanon
2
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA
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Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, and Western Pacific. Schools and workplaces shut down, borders between countries closed, and countries imposed travel restrictions as a precautionary safety measure to limit spread of the virus. Under such dire conditions, the public searches for information and guidance that helps them react in an evidence-based manner to the outbreak to limit viral transmission. Media, in various forms, becomes the primary source of information. A surfeit of information about the COVID-19 pandemic spread widely. While some information was true, much was false. This resulted in an ‘infodemic,’ whereby waves of misinformation and rumors on the pandemic interfered with quelling it. The COVID-19 infodemic did not come as a surprise. In 2018, Heidi Larson predicted that the impact of the next major outbreak would be magnified by emotional contagion that would be digitally enabled [3]. She based her prediction on epidemiological studies
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