TBR News March 13, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. March 13, 2020:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for March 13, 2020 : A random selection of main-line media headlines March 13, 2020. They reflect the hysteria and inaccuracy of media perception very clearly. One can get more accurate information from a public lavatory wall than the average news site.

• What you need to know today about world death plague
• Life upended for all Americans
• Presidential elections cancelled in US. Trump to be declared president by committee of Congress
• Fed to recall and sieze all American paper money to protect aganst coronovirus
• Special Report: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics
• In China’s virus epicenter, just five new cases
• Government officials respond to Reuters report on secrecy of coronavirus discussions
• Exclusive: Japan’s economic policymakers now factoring in Olympics cancelation, sources say
• Clamor grows for Trump to cut China tariffs in coronavirus response
• Fed’s economic forecasts to give window into extent of coronavirus fears
• Croatia closes schools for two weeks for coronavirus
• Thai forex firm disinfects banknotes to fight coronavirus
• Rome cardinal rolls back on decree closing churches after papal rebuff
• Catholics rail against ‘Christ in quarantine’ church closures in Rome
• Explainer: Keep calm and carry on – what is the logic behind Britain’s coronavirus bet?
• Coronavirus hits politicians, sports and showbiz stars as it spreads across globe, killing dozens
• Millions banned from schools in US as disease spreads. Two dead in Maine
• Stock futures bounce back after pandemic-driven carnage
• World’s biggest water fights called off as Southeast Asia scales back New Year
• Ethiopia confirms its first case of coronavirus
• What you need to know about coronavirus today
• Northern Italy in complete lockdown; three dead as of March 13
• Czech government bans most travel in and out of country to fight coronavirus
• UK plan for coronavirus based on scientific advice: PM’s spokesman
• Poland’s president calls off Russia trip due to coronavirus: official
• Lebanese central bank asks banks to prioritize FX transfers for coronavirus supplies
• 28m ago Iraqi religious authorities say U.S. air strike hit civilian airport in anti virus attack
• HSBC activates social distancing, split-site measures in UK due to virus
• Coronavirus live updates: Justin Trudeau’s wife tests positive, Europe shuts schools, sport events cancelled.
• Cats suspected of carrying coronavirus. LA will round up and euthanize all stray cats. Dogs may be next, officials warn and street people will be moved to Death Valley facility until epidemic is over
• The coronavirus pandemic: visualising the global crisis
• The WHO has declared the global outbreak a pandemic. Take a look at the data behind the spread of the virus
• Mount Everest calls off climbing season;
• Canadian prime minister self-isolates;
• London Underground driver tests positive
• Miami cab driver tests positive for coronavirus, city in virtual lockdown
• Pandemic reaches world leaders and disrupts global sporting events
• Justin Trudeau in self-isolation after wife tests positive
• All Champions League and Europa League games next week postponed
• The coronavirus pandemic: visualising the growing global crisis
• 233,000 now infected in Germany; ten die
• All professional football in England suspended
• England’s cricket tour of Sri Lanka cancelled
• Champions League postponed
• London Tube driver tests positive for coronavirus. City at risk and half the population of London flees to York
• Premier League and British football set for coronavirus shutdown
• US election campaign goes virtual as country faces coronavirus shut-down – live updates
• Biden to hold ‘virtual town hall’ as president due to meet industry execs over Covid-19 response
• Anger grows at Trump administration’s coronavirus testing failures
• Markets rebound amid coronavirus stimulus hopes – business live
• Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
• Coronavirus – latest news
• Introduction: Markets reopen after 52% rout on Thursday
• The Virus Reaches Into Halls of Power Around the World
• An Australian official has the virus. He met with Attorney General William Barr and Ivanka Trump last week.
• New York City declared a state of emergency, and schools will close in at least six states.
• The normally bustling Navigli area of Milan was almost deserted on Thursday. Daily life has ground to a halt in Italy.
• House to Vote on Sweeping Economic Rescue Package: The legislation would include enhanced unemployment benefits, free virus testing, aid for food assistance programs and federal funds for Medicaid.
• European stocks climbed back after Wall Street’s descent. Here’s the latest on the markets.
• The Worst-Case Estimate for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths
• Officials at the C.D.C. and epidemic experts conferred last month about what could happen in the U.S.
• Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, Wife of Canada’s Leader, Has Coronavirus
• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will remain in isolation for the next two weeks.
• How to work from home
• What to do with your money; out of the bank and hide it in your office or home
• Can you boost your immune system?
• A glossary of coronavirus terms
• Bulgarian airport attendant tests positive; all airports in Europe to close for a month.
• Spot price of gold drops to ten dollars an ounce due to coronovirus threat

BBC Buries the Lead in 8th Paragraph: Coronavirus Death Rate Only 0.7% in S. Korea Due to Thorough Testing
March 12, 2020
by Craig Bannister
A BBC article devotes seven paragraphs warning about the coronavirus threat in South Korea before mentioning that the country’s “trace, test and treat” policies may be proof that the fatality rate reported worldwide is greatly inflated because so many asymptomatic cases are going unidentified.
The story, “Coronavirus in South Korea: How ‘trace, test and treat’ may be saving lives,” provides personal accounts of South Koreans who have either been subjected to, or who conduct, coronavirus testing. But, in the eighth paragraph, the article drops a bombshell statistic – South Korea’s coronavirus fatality rate is nearly five times lower than that reported globally – before returning to its narration:
“Health officials believe this approach may be saving lives. The fatality rate for coronavirus in South Korea is 0.7%. Globally the World Health Organization has reported 3.4% – but scientists estimate that the death rate is lower because not all cases are reported.”
The BBC story also mentions that South Korea has the highest per capita coronavirus testing of any country in the world.
The implication: with more widespread testing, more people with coronavirus who have either no, or very mild, symptoms are identified – making the number of deaths a smaller percentage of the number of recorded coronavirus cases. Thus, the fatality rates being widely reported by the media may be greatly exaggerated.
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COVID-19 Isn’t As Deadly As We Think
Don’t hoard masks and food. Figure out how to help seniors and the immunosuppressed stay healthy.
by Jeremy Samuel Faust
Slate
There are many compelling reasons to conclude that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is not nearly as deadly as is currently feared. But COVID-19 panic has set in nonetheless. You can’t find hand sanitizer in stores, and N95 face masks are being sold online for exorbitant prices, never mind that neither is the best way to protect against the virus (yes, just wash your hands). The public is behaving as if this epidemic is the next Spanish flu, which is frankly understandable given that initial reports have staked COVID-19 mortality at about 2–3 percent, quite similar to the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people.
Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold. The true case fatality rate, known as CFR, of this virus is likely to be far lower than current reports suggest. Even some lower estimates, such as the 1 percent death rate recently mentioned by the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likely substantially overstate the case.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the numbers are inflated. In past epidemics, initial CFRs were floridly exaggerated. For example, in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic some early estimates were 10 times greater than the eventual CFR, of 1.28 percent. Epidemiologists think and quibble in terms of numerators and denominators—which patients were included when fractional estimates were calculated, which weren’t, were those decisions valid—and the results change a lot as a result. We are already seeing this. In the early days of the crisis in Wuhan, China, the CFR was more than 4 percent. As the virus spread to other parts of Hubei, the number fell to 2 percent. As it spread through China, the reported CFR dropped further, to 0.2 to 0.4 percent. As testing begins to include more asymptomatic and mild cases, more realistic numbers are starting to surface. New reports from the World Health Organization that estimate the global death rate of COVID-19 to be 3.4 percent, higher than previously believed, is not cause for further panic. This number is subject to the same usual forces that we would normally expect to inaccurately embellish death rate statistics early in an epidemic. If anything, it underscores just how early we are in this.
But the most straightforward and compelling evidence that the true case fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is well under 1 percent comes not from statistical trends and methodological massage, but from data from the Diamond Princess cruise outbreak and subsequent quarantine off the coast of Japan.
A quarantined boat is an ideal—if unfortunate—natural laboratory to study a virus. Many variables normally impossible to control are controlled. We know that all but one patient boarded the boat without the virus. We know that the other passengers were healthy enough to travel. We know their whereabouts and exposures. While the numbers coming out of China are scary, we don’t know how many of those patients were already ill for other reasons. How many were already hospitalized for another life-threatening illness and then caught the virus? How many were completely healthy, caught the virus, and developed a critical illness? In the real world, we just don’t know.
Here’s the problem with looking at mortality numbers in a general setting: In China, 9 million people die per year, which comes out to 25,000 people every single day, or around 1.5 million people over the past two months alone. A significant fraction of these deaths results from diseases like emphysema/COPD, lower respiratory infections, and cancers of the lung and airway whose symptoms are clinically indistinguishable from the nonspecific symptoms seen in severe COVID-19 cases. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the death rate from COVID-19 in China spiked precisely among the same age groups in which these chronic diseases first become common. During the peak of the outbreak in China in January and early February, around 25 patients per day were dying with SARS-CoV-2. Most were older patients in whom the chronic diseases listed above are prevalent. Most deaths occurred in Hubei province, an area in which lung cancer and emphysema/COPD are significantly higher than national averages in China, a country where half of all men smoke. How were doctors supposed to sort out which of those 25 out of 25,000 daily deaths were solely due to coronavirus, and which were more complicated? What we need to know is how many excess deaths this virus causes.
This is where the Diamond Princess data provides important insight. Of the 3,711 people on board, at least 705 have tested positive for the virus (which, considering the confines, conditions, and how contagious this virus appears to be, is surprisingly low). Of those, more than half are asymptomatic, while very few asymptomatic people were detected in China. This alone suggests a halving of the virus’s true fatality rate.
On the Diamond Princess, six deaths have occurred among the passengers, constituting a case fatality rate of 0.85 percent. Unlike the data from China and elsewhere, where sorting out why a patient died is extremely difficult, we can assume that these are excess fatalities—they wouldn’t have occurred but for SARS-CoV-2. The most important insight is that all six fatalities occurred in patients who are more than 70 years old. Not a single Diamond Princess patient under age 70 has died. If the numbers from reports out of China had held, the expected number of deaths in those under 70 should have been around four.

The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong, and Everyone Knows It
Because the U.S. data on coronavirus infections are so deeply flawed, the quantification of the outbreak obscures more than it illuminates.
March 3, 2020
by Alexis C. Madrigal
The Atlantic
We know, irrefutably, one thing about the coronavirus in the United States: The number of cases reported in every chart and table is far too low.
The data are untrustworthy because the processes we used to get them were flawed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testing procedures missed the bulk of the cases. They focused exclusively on travelers, rather than testing more broadly, because that seemed like the best way to catch cases entering the country.
Just days ago, it was not clear that the virus had spread solely from domestic contact at all. But then cases began popping up with no known international connection. What public-health experts call “community spread” had arrived in the United States. The virus would not be stopped by tight borders, because it was already propagating domestically. Trevor Bedford’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which studies viral evolution, concluded there is “firm evidence” that, at least in Washington State, the coronavirus had been spreading undetected for weeks. Now different projections estimate that 20 to 1,500 people have already been infected in the greater Seattle area. In California, too, the disease appears to be spreading, although the limited testing means that no one is quite sure how far.
In total, fewer than 500 people have been tested across the country (although the CDC has stopped reporting that number in its summary of the outbreak). As a result, the current “official” case count inside the United States stood at 43 as of this morning (excluding cruise-ship cases). This number is wrong, yet it’s still constantly printed and quoted. In other contexts, we’d call this what it is: a subtle form of misinformation.
This artificially low number means that for the past few weeks, we’ve seen massive state action abroad and only simmering unease domestically. While Chinese officials were enacting a world-historic containment effort—putting more than 700 million people under some kind of movement restriction, quarantining tens of millions of people, and placing others under new kinds of surveillance—and American public-health officials were staring at the writing on the wall that the disease was extremely likely to spread in the U.S., the public-health response was stuck in neutral. The case count in the U.S. was not increasing at all. Preparing for a sizable outbreak seemed absurd when there were fewer than 20 cases on American soil. Now we know that the disease was already spreading and that it was the U.S. response that was stalled.
Meanwhile, South Korean officials have been testing more than 10,000 people a day, driving up the country’s reported-case count. Same goes for Italy: high test rate, high number of cases. (Now some Italian politicians want to restrict testing.) In China, the official data say the country has more than 80,000 cases, but the real number might be far, far higher because of all the people who had mild(er) cases and were turned away from medical care, or never sought it in the first place. That may be cause for reassurance (though not everyone agrees), because the total number of cases is the denominator in the simple equation that yields a fatality rate: deaths divided by cases. More cases with the same number of deaths means that the disease is likely less deadly than the data show.
Read: What you can do right now about the coronavirus
The point is that every country’s numbers are the result of a specific set of testing and accounting regimes. Everyone is cooking the data, one way or another. And yet, even though these inconsistencies are public and plain, people continue to rely on charts showing different numbers, with no indication that they are not all produced with the same rigor or vigor. This is bad. It encourages dangerous behavior such as cutting back testing to bring a country’s numbers down or slow-walking testing to keep a country’s numbers low.
The other problem is, now that the U.S. appears to be ramping up testing, the number of cases will grow quickly. Public-health officials are currently cautioning people not to worry as that happens, but it will be hard to disambiguate what proportion of the ballooning number of cases is the result of more testing and what proportion is from the actual spread of the virus.
People trust data. Numbers seem real. Charts have charismatic power. People believe what can be quantified. But data do not always accurately reflect the state of the world. Or as one scholar put it in a book title: “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron.
The reality gap between American numbers and American cases is wide. Regular citizens and decision makers cannot rely on only the numbers to make decisions. Sometimes quantification actually obscures as much as it reveals.
Coronavirus misinformation spreading fast: Fake news on COVID-19 shared far more than CDC, WHO reports
Content engagement on false and misleading news about the COVID-19 virus illness is over 142 times that of legitimate and expert sources such as the CDC and WHO, according to NewsGuard.
by Jason Perlow
The vast majority of coronavirus information shared across social media comes from fake news sites, according to Newsguard, a service that rates the credibility and transparency of web news content. Meanwhile, official sources like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) receive only a tiny fraction of the social engagement concerning COVID-19.
The NewsGuard subscription service recently launched a Coronavirus Misinformation Tracking Center that lists websites reporting misleading and outright false information about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 respiratory illness.
Since launch, its list of websites with false and misleading content related to COVID-19 has grown from 31 sites to over 106 in the US and Europe.
From cancelled conferences to disrupted supply chains, not a corner of the global economy is immune to the spread of COVID-19.
New additions to the list include 54 websites in the NaturalNews.com network — a group of sites that consists of the deceptive domains FactCheck.news and Pandemic.news — which publishes medical and non-medical conspiracy theories since 2003 — as well as French and German sites from Sputnik News, the Russian state-owned news agency.
Here is what should be of primary concern: Content engagement, in the form of social media likes, shares, and comments, from the 75 US-based sites on that list is many times higher than overall engagement on the official advisories and content released by the CDC and the WHO.
The scientific and medical community views these two health organizations as the definitive sources of information and about the virus outbreak itself.
Over the last 90 days, posts from the websites of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization received 364,483 “engagements,” or likes, shares, and comments on social media. In that same period, the 76 US sites that NewsGuard found to have published coronavirus misinformation received a combined 52,053,542 engagements — more than 142 times the engagement of the two major public health institutions providing information about the outbreak.

Coronavirus Is Spreading — And So Are the Hoaxes and Conspiracy Theories Around It
As the virus spreads, people are making some pretty outrageous (and inaccurate) claims
by EJ Dickson
Rolling Stone
Since initial reports of novel coronavirus (known in public health circles by the unsexy moniker COVID-19) started surfacing earlier this year, the response on social media has ranged widely from measured caution to unmitigated panic. Global stocks have plummeted, and although cases in China are falling, there are at least 545 cases of coronavirus in the United States, with at least 22 patients dying from the illness.
Jordan Tustin, an assistant professor in public health specializing in epidemiology at Ryerson University, says there’s still more to learn about the virus. “It is important to note that we need to better understand how easily the virus can spread from person-to-person in order to better assess the risk posed to the public and globally,” she says. That said, as Angela Rasmussen, a virologist who serves on the faculty at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s school of public health, told Rolling Stone on Friday, it’s not time to panic. “Don’t freak out,” she said.
Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped people in the United States from circulating rumors and misinformation about the virus, with a healthy dose of rabid conspiracy theorizing and racism-tinged paranoia to boot. The fact that the virus appears to have originated in China seems to have exacerbated the opportunity to spread misinformation, says Jen Grygiel, assistant professor in communications specializing in memes and social media at Syracuse University. “When psychological states are peaked and people are anxious, they’re more apt to share [inaccurate] information,” they tell Rolling Stone. “Given the strained relations between China and the U.S., there’s even more anxiety there.” And because there’s heightened skepticism on social media about the official narratives issued by the government (skepticism that is encouraged by government officials themselves such as President Trump), this has contributed to a deep sense of anxiety and fear where misinformation can thrive. Here are the most common rumors and hoaxes that have spread as a result of reports of novel coronavirus, and why such misinformation tends to spread in the midst of a public health crisis.
1) The government introduced the coronavirus in 2018, and Bill Gates was also somehow responsible.
On January 21st, QAnon YouTuber and professional shit-strirrer Jordan Sather tweeted a link to a patent for coronavirus filed by the U.K.-based Pirbright Institute in 2015. “Was the release of this disease planned?” Sather tweeted. “Is the media being used to incite fear around it? Is the Cabal desperate for money, so they’re tapping their Big Pharma reserves?” This theory quickly gained traction in many conspiracy theorist circles, with QAnon and anti-vaccine Facebook groups posting links to the patent suggesting that the government had introduced coronavirus, presumably to make money off a potential vaccine.
Adding fuel to the fire, Sather followed up by linking the Pirbright Foundation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, based on a 2019 press release announcing that the foundation would be helping to fund an unrelated project to study livestock disease and immunology. (Along with other so-called “elites,” Bill Gates is a frequent target of QAnon conspiracy theories.) His inclusion was not particularly surprising, says Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “Any time there is an outbreak story with a vaccine conspiracy angle, Gates is worked into it. This type of content was very similar to Zika conspiracies,” she tells Rolling Stone.
According to a Pirbright spokesperson who spoke with BuzzFeed News, the 2015 coronavirus patent was intended to facilitate the development of a vaccine for a specific type of avian coronavirus found in chickens, which have not been implicated as a potential cause of COVID-19. Further, the spokesperson said that the Gates foundation did not fund the 2015 patent, thus ostensibly negating any potential connection between the billionaire and coronavirus. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from continuing to widely speculate about his involvement, especially following the wide circulation of a 2018 Business Insider article about a presentation Gates gave at a 2018 Massachusetts Medical Society and New England Journal of Medicine event. During the discussion, Gates presented a simulation suggesting that a flu similar to the 1918 flu pandemic could kill 50 million people within six months, adding that the global public health community was unequipped to deal with the fallout of such an event.
Gates’s presentation was in the context of a wider argument that governments need to work better with the private sector to develop the technology to fight a potential pandemic. “The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war,” Gates said. To a rational person, this would clearly indicate that he was arguing for better preparedness in fighting pandemics, not gleefully anticipating a potential future one — yet on social media, the article was widely cited by conspiracy theorists as a globalist billionaire ominously predicting the engineering of a global catastrophe, for no reason other than personal profit.
2) There is a vaccine or cure for coronavirus that the government won’t release
A viral Facebook post dated from January 22nd contains a screengrab of a patent filed by the CDC for what is purported to be a coronavirus vaccine, suggesting that the virus was introduced by the government for pharmaceutical companies to profit off the vaccine. While this makes no sense on even the most superficial level (novel coronavirus is, by definition, brand-new, so it would be impossible for there to already be a vaccine for it), the screengrabbed patent actually applies to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), another type of coronavirus that also originated in China and killed hundreds of people in 2002 and 2003. Although there have been reports of companies receiving funding to developing a vaccine for n-CoV, currently “there are no vaccines available for any coronaviruses let alone the (Wuhan) one,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, told PolitiFact.
3) Coronavirus originated with Chinese people eating bats
Because most coronaviruses originate among mammals, and because the current working theory is that COVID-19 originated in a live animal market in Wuhan, many on social media have jumped to the conclusion that some Chinese people’s predilection for eating bats is putting global health at risk. This assumption has been bolstered by a number of viral videos purporting to show people eating bats or bat soup: “Does this thing look like death in your bowl?,” one tweet in Mandarin with more than 2,000 likes reads. The videos were immediately picked up by tabloids and conservative blogs, which ran such non-judgmental, non-Eurocentric headlines as, “Is this objectively disgusting soup what’s causing the coronavirus outbreak?” And social media users reacted in kind, professing their horror at the clips. “Y’all Chinese people eat this shit and expect to be fine? Cmon,” one tweet said.
Of course, while eating small mammals like bats isn’t unheard of in some parts of China, it’s also not exactly commonplace, and that claiming otherwise about a country of more than 1.3 billion people is a massive generalization, to say the least. Survey data of Chinese diners from 2006 suggests that the practice of eating exotic animals became even less common following the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, the source of which was believed to be bats (though researchers that the virus was actually passed to humans via palm civets, a type of large cat). More to the point, there is no evidence that eating bats was the source of the coronavirus outbreak; authorities have stated that many people who tested positive for COVID-19 did not have any contact with live animals prior to contracting the illness, and a report from the Journal of Medical Virology actually suggests that snakes may have been the cause of the infection.
In summation, we don’t know exactly how COVID-19 is transmitted, but it’s safe to say that characterizing the virus as a product of an entire country’s eating habits feels both inaccurate and wildly offensive. “It’s not simply a matter of the consumption of exotic animals per se,” says Adam Kamradt-Scott, associate professor specializing in global health security at the University of Sydney, told Time. “So we need to be mindful of picking on or condemning cultural practices.” That’s especially true considering the practice of eating exotic animals stems from a collective national memory of famine and food shortages, as political economist Hu Xingdou told the New Zealand Herald. “Chinese people view food as their primary need because starving is a big threat and an unforgettable part of the national memory,” Hu said. “While feeding themselves is not a problem to many Chinese nowadays, eating novel food or meat, organs or parts from rare animals or plants has become a measure of identity to some people.”
4) The virus is no worse than the common cold
This one was espoused by none other than Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh on his radio show. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Limbaugh said on February 24th. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” He went on to claim that the media was drumming up panic about COVID-19 purely to undermine the Trump administration: “They are trying to use this coronavirus to scare the hell out of everybody in their madcap hopes of finding something that will get rid of Donald Trump. It’s exactly like the panic and fear mongering you heard for two years over Russia meddling in and stealing the election.”
COVID-19 is not the common cold, for numerous reasons: aside from having completely different symptoms (fever, cough, etc.), it also has a mortality rate of about 2 percent, which the common cold does not. The reason why Limbaugh may have made that claim, however, is because COVID-19 is a type of coronavirus, an umbrella term used to describe a group of viruses including the common cold. This is a very basic fact about the coronavirus. But we are, after all, talking about Rush Limbaugh here.
5) Hand dryers are effective at killing coronavirus
As far as we currently know, coronavirus is spread in part by coming into contact with infected objects or surfaces (hence, why government health organizations have really drilled down the importance of washing your hands). Last month, Chinese social media was brimming with theories that using a hand dryer for at least 30 seconds was an effective method of warding off coronavirus. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has set up a page for debunking coronavirus myths, this is ineffective. What is effective is watching your hands with soap and water thoroughly and/or using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer (think Purell), and then wiping your hands with a paper towel or using a hand dryer. But putting your hands under heat in itself does next to nothing.
6) Coronavirus is a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese government (or the CIA) to wage war on America (or China)
Due to the recent history of strained diplomatic relations between the two countries, it makes sense that some would speculate that coronavirus was covertly engineered in a lab as part of an extended campaign to weaken the opposing country. Sen. Tom Cotton (R – Ark.) has publicly endorsed this idea on Fox News last month, “We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Cotton said. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.” (British tabloid the Daily Mail also published a story on the existence of this lab, heavily implying that it was responsible for the spread of the virus.)
Unfortunately for conspiracy theory-mongers, there’s “absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered,” Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Post, adding that “the possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.” But that certainly hasn’t stopped even government officials from continuing to sow the seeds of this theory, with congressional candidate Joanne Wright tweeting on February 28th about Gates potentially funding the development of the disease in the Wuhan lab. (Twitter has added a link to the website for the Centers for Disease Control at the top of search results for Wright and coronavirus, in part to curb such misinformation without explicitly banning it.)
7) Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus
When it comes to major world events, it’s not uncommon for enterprising sleuths to dig deep into fictional sources to find a premonition, however tenuous it may be. (Remember when people thought that Back to the Future II predicted the Cubs’ big World Series win? Or Trump?) In that same vein, last month a screengrab of a passage from author Dean Koontz’s 1981 novel The Eyes of Darkness went viral on Twitter, as the passage appears to allude to the creation of a deadly virus known as Wuhan-400, named after the city from which it originated.
Aside from the reference to Wuhan, however (which didn’t even appear in the first edition of Koontz’s book), there are no similarities between Wuhan-400 and COVID-19. Unlike COVID-19, which has about a 2% fatality rate, Wuhan-400 kills 100% of its victims, mostly by creating a “toxin that literally eats away brain tissue,” rendering victims without a pulse. So while it may be tempting for proponents of the COVID-19 as bioweapon theory to point to Koontz’s book as a harbinger of events to come, it appears the parallels between the two are tenuous at best. Still, there’s no shortage of other works of fiction for armchair COVID-19 detectives to point to, up to and including…
8) The Simpsons predicted the coronavirus
Because The Simpsons has been on the air for more than 30 years, there’s been no shortage of elaborate plotlines for internet sleuths to point to as harbingers for various world events, to the degree that “The Simpsons predicted it” is now more of a meme than anything else. Case in point: screengrabs allegedly from the 1993 episode “Marge in Chains” about an outbreak of a mysterious illness, with one appearing to show a newscaster delivering a report about a “corona virus.” Although the episode in question is legit, it focuses on an illness called “Osaka flu” (with Osaka obviously being in Japan, not in China), and the screengrab, which is from another episode entirely, actually reads “Apocalypse Meow,” not “coronavirus.” So chalk this up to Photoshopping and morbidly wishful thinking on internet commenters’ parts.
9) A “miracle” bleach product can cure coronavirus
In one of the most sickening examples of conspiracy theorists taking advantage of the panic surrounding coronavirus to sell a product, supporters of the elaborate far-right conspiracy theory QAnon have been telling people to drink Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), a bleach-based product that has been touted by anti-vaxxers for years, as an effective means of warding off coronavirus. The product contains toxic chemicals and can result in vomiting, diarrhea, and acute liver failure if ingested in large amounts. (Horrifyingly, in the past some mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder have been known to administer it to them as a “cure.”) Although YouTube instituted a ban on videos promoting MMS last year, as Rolling Stone reported in January, it was not difficult to find such content on the platform, illustrating the immense difficulties platforms have faced in attempting to curb the spread of COVID-19-related misinformation.