During a Pandemic, an Unanticipated Problem : Out-of-Work Health Workers - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/us/politics/coronavirus-health-care-workers-layoffs.html
Across the country, plunging revenues from canceled nonemergency medical appointments have forced hospitals to furlough or cut the pay of doctors, nurses and other staff.
abus de cliniques privées nuit à la santé
Opinion | What We Pretend to Know About the Coronavirus Could Kill Us - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-fake-news.html
Article passionnant sur l’enjeu des fausses informations, sur la différence de temps entre la réflexion et la science d’un côté et les outils de l’information de l’autre. Les fausses informations se construisent sur la multiplicité des données disponibles. En ajoutant des chiffres et des courbes, les fake news adoptent un « effet de réel » qui les rend crédibles. Une vieille technique littéraire largement exploitée par la science fiction depuis Jules verne.
(complément : je viens de trouver une version en français à : ▻https://teles-relay.com/2020/04/03/opinion-ce-que-nous-pretendons-savoir-sur-le-coronavirus-pourrait-nous-)
Other than a vaccine or an extra 500,000 ventilators, tests and hospital beds, reliable information is the best weapon we have against Covid-19. It allows us to act uniformly and decisively to flatten the curve. In an ideal pandemic scenario, sound information is produced by experts and travels quickly to the public.
But we seem to be living in a nightmare scenario. The coronavirus emerged in the middle of a golden age for media manipulation. And it is stealthy, resilient and confounding to experts. It moves far faster than scientists can study it. What seems to be true today may be wrong tomorrow. Uncertainty abounds. And an array of dangerous misinformation, disinformation and flawed amateur analysis fills the void.
On Friday, President Trump announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had changed the recommendation on masks to say that all Americans should use “non-medical, cloth” ones. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s only a recommendation.”
But the reversal may prove costly for the World Health Organization’s and the C.D.C.’s credibility. As Zeynep Tufekci, a University of North Carolina professor, wrote in a Times Op-Ed weeks ago, a lack of transparency up front created its own information crisis. “What should the authorities have said?” she asked. “The full painful truth.”
The fear and uncertainty around the coronavirus is, of course, fertile ground for extremists and hucksters. Alex Jones of Infowars is pushing a conspiracy theory that the virus is an American-made biological weapon and is directing viewers to purchase any number of overpriced vitamin products from his stores. People who believe the myth that 5G wireless signals are harmful to health have falsely linked the technology to Covid-19.
The anti-vaccination movement is also capitalizing on the pandemic. The New York Times used the analytics tool CrowdTangle to survey 48 prominent anti-vax Instagram accounts and found that video views spiked from 200,000 in February to more than two million in March, just as the pandemic took off globally. Another Times analysis of anti-vax accounts showed a surge in followers during the last week of March. In private groups on Facebook, junk science and unproven treatment claims proliferate.
But you don’t have to be a science denier to end up seduced by bad information. A pandemic makes us all excellent targets for misinformation. No one has natural immunity to this coronavirus, leaving us all threatened and looking for information to make sense of the world. Unfortunately, the pace of scientific discovery doesn’t match the speed of our information ecosystems. As Wired reported in March, researchers are moving faster than ever to understand the virus — so fast that it may be compromising some of the rigor.
But much of the pernicious false news about the coronavirus operates on the margins of believability — real facts and charts cobbled together to formulate a dangerous, wrongheaded conclusion or news reports that combine a majority of factually accurate reporting with a touch of unproven conjecture.
The phenomenon is common enough that it already has its own name: armchair epidemiology, which Slate described as “convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses.” The prime example is a Medium blog post titled “Covid-19 — Evidence Over Hysteria” by Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley product manager and “growth hacker” who argued against the severity of the virus and condemned the mainstream media for hyping it.
Without a deeper knowledge of epidemiology or evolutionary biology, it would have been easy to be seduced by Mr. Ginn’s piece. This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,” he told me. “When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”
It’s this type of misinformation on the margins that’s most insidious. “I am seeing this playbook more and more,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “Secondhand data showing a crisis narrative that feels just a bit too well crafted. Mixing the truth with the plausible and the plausible with that which seems plausibly true in a week.” Dr. Bergstrom argues that the advances in available data make it easier than ever for junk-science peddlers to appear legitimate.
This hybrid of true and false information is a challenge for social media platforms. Covid-19 and the immediate threat to public health means that networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been unusually decisive about taking down misinformation. “In a case of a pandemic like this, when we are seeing posts that are urging people not to get treatment,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said recently, “that’s a completely different class of content versus the back-and-forth of what candidates may say about each other.”
Facebook took down a video of Mr. Bolsonaro when it became clear he was using the platform to spread unproven claims that chloroquine was an effective cure for the coronavirus. Similarly, Twitter temporarily locked the account of Rudolph Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City and Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, for violating Twitter’s rules on Covid-19 misinformation with regard to hydroxychloroquine treatments. Depending on how you feel about technology companies, this is either heartening progress or proof that the companies could have been doing far more to tamp down misinformation over the past five years.
The platforms are slightly more prepared than they once were to counter public-health myths, having changed their policies around medical misinformation after measles outbreaks in 2019. “With measles there was a lot of available authoritative information about measles,” Ms. DiResta told me. “The difference with coronavirus is that until months ago, nobody had seen this virus before.”
“The really big question that haunts me is, ‘When do we return to reality?’” Mr. Pomerantsev mused over the phone from his own quarantine. “Or is it that in this partisan age absolutely everything is chopped, cut and edited to fit a different view? I’m waiting for society to finally hit up against a shared reality, like diving into the bottom of swimming pool. Instead we just go deeper.”