Meet the myth-busters of COVID-19

The internet’s penchant for distorting facts may be nothing new. But when the misinformation starts to interfere with the dissemination of accurate COVID-19 facts, that is when scientists said they start to worry.

The scientific community pointed out that false information in India about COVID-19 first started to proliferate when the disease emerged in the country in early March. This began to reach a fevered pitch when the lockdown was imposed on March 25.

Some of the more popular falsehoods about the virus which went "viral” on the internet claim Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, was manufactured in a lab, that eating non-vegetarian food is risky, that drinking cow urine or eating cow dung may make you immune to the disease, that Indians have better immunity against the coronavirus, that clapping hands can kill the virus, that pets can transmit the disease, that eating garlic can help, and that nothing was better than standing in the sun.

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Professor Rajesh Gopakumar, Centre Director of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, explained that members of the scientific community felt strongly about countering these “alternative facts".

“The scientific community is on the front-end against this disease, trying to contribute to the vaccines, but many of us also felt that we needed to bring our scientific expertise to counter a lot of the misinformation out there,” he said.

There is, after all, a need for reliable information based on science because of the infodemic of misinformation about COVID-19, added Professor Arnab Bhattacharya of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. “This compels us to realise that, similar to climate change, ignoring science can quickly intensify problems to a global scale,” he said.

One result was the launching of a website on April 4, Covid-Gyan.in, to become a repository of easy-to-understand information relevant to the virus and the disease.

'Informational campaign'

The brainchild of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Indian Institute of Science and the Tata Memorial Centre, the site sees scientists and researchers mix their expertise with designers to produce thoughtful infographics, videos, 'do-it-yourself' tutorials and materials explaining national policies introduced to fight the pandemic and communicate some of the fast developments in science against the disease.

The scientific community is willing to put our faces, names and credentials to validate the information, said Professor Satyajit Mayor, Centre Director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, which is a coordinator for the campaign.

"The site will also allow us to talk about the immediate scientific responses we are able to make to beat the virus. That is the next stage of this informational campaign. All materials will be shared on social media and across 12 Indian languages - to make an impact,” he added.

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This idea of multilingual reach is especially important to Pooja Chandrashekar, a 22-year-old first-year student with Bengaluru roots at Harvard Medical School.

Pooja is responsible for starting the 'COVID-19 Health Literacy Project' (covid19healthliteracyproject.com) to create and translate accessible COVID-19 information into different languages to help all patients know when, and how, to seek care.

Initially, Pooja was a one-person crusader, but she was rapidly joined by other members of the medical student community. Many of them, like Pooja, came from mutli-lingual backgrounds.

“My parents were immigrants from Bengaluru and I have always been cognizant of the fact that most health information isn’t available in Asian languages. This leaves immigrants and non-English communities without access to public health information and vulnerable to the spread of misinformation,” she said.

“Folks from these communities are at a higher risk of infection from COVID-19 due to the lack of accessible health information,” she added.

Currently, the 'COVID-19 Health Literacy Project' is a coalition of over 175 medical students in the US representing 30 institutions and 37 languages, including esoteric ones such as Navajo and Creole. Among the Indian languages covered are Bengali, Gujurati, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Telugu and Punjabi.

“We are now working on refining and finalising Kannada materials,” Pooja said, adding that all materials are vetted and reviewed by physicians and faculty members at Harvard.

'Unlimited supply of hoaxes'

Meantime, a coalition of 400 scientists and researchers were coming together to form a digital society calling itself the Indian Scientists’ Response to COVID-19 (ISRC).

The society aims to provide scientific resources for activist groups working on the ground and to act as interpreters for the public at large, explained Dr Reeteka Sud, Research Coordinator for Accelerator Programme for Discovery in Brain Disorders using Stem Cells at Nimhans.

One area where the group said it is heavily focused on is hoax-busting. “There is of course, an unlimited supply of myths and hoaxes, that we had to do something about,” she said.

“Our point simply is that asking for evidence has to become as popular as forwarding WhatsApp messages is. Once that happens, maybe we will be better able to tackle this ‘misinfodemic’,” she added.

This aspiration appears to be on-track. According to ISRC, it has had 20,000 visitors since the website went live a week ago. The hoax-busters page hit more than 4,000 on Sunday alone, said another member of the collective.