COVID-19 Fact and Fiction #20

The world is dealing with an unprecedented health crisis caused by a new virus. With new insights in the way COVID19 spreads, in the way the virus behaves and in the way to deal with the pandemic every day, it is now more important than ever to safeguard the information we share is accurate and fact-based. We have to inoculate ourselves against the fake news and misinformation that infect our newsfeeds and timelines at this crucial moment by fact-checking.

For the duration of the pandemic, I will try to give you an overview of the main issues in CoronaCheck, an Australian email newsletter with the latest from around the world concerning the coronavirus, but now appear only once a week.*

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As I’ve mentioned last week, Melbourne, Victoria, had seen a surge in new cases which has worsened over the past week. This outbreak has brought the coronavirus back in the political arena, setting up states with either left-wing Labor or right-wing Liberal/National Coalition governments against each other in their attempt to deal with the spread of the virus beyond Victoria’s borders.

RMIT ABC Fact Check has dedicated most of this week’s coronavirus fact-checking to Australia. They’ve focussed in particular on the Black Lives Matter protest’s supposed links to a surge in coronavirus cases in Victoria because of the court hearing over a protest planned for Sydney next week, and the renewed media coverage of a similar rally held in Melbourne back in June.

I’ve posted the whole section dedicated to this topic, with annotations where Australian matters needed to be explained both for the sake of clarity and because similar reports are coming in from the US but have added my own pictures.

EXPLAINING THE BLACK LIVES MATTER ‘LINKS’ TO MELBOURNE’S CORONAVIRUS SURGE

Suggestions of a link between a Black Lives Matter rally held in Melbourne on June 6 and an outbreak of coronavirus cases in public housing towers continue to spread, with NSW (Liberal/National Coalition government) Police Commissioner Mick Fuller this week adding fuel to the fire.

Speaking on Sydney radio station 2GB before a court hearing on a Black Lives Matter protest planned for Sydney next week, Commissioner Fuller said that based on “some pretty good intelligence out of Victoria” he knew “how dangerous these protests can be in terms of health”.

“From our perspective it was obviously big numbers in Victoria (Labor government), a number of people who came to the protest were living in those vertical towers* so that certainly is enough for me.”

But in a statement to the ABC last week, the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) said that of the six protesters who subsequently tested positive to COVID-19, none were known to live in a “major public housing complex”*.

Commissioner Fuller’s remarks come in the wake of a report in The Australian (major right-wing newspaper) that Victorian health authorities had “confirmed a link between two COVID-19 cases in people who attended the Black Lives Matter protest and the cluster of at least 242 cases in public housing towers in the city’s inner northwest”.

“While the confirmation stops short of establishing the protest as a cause of the public housing megacluster, it demonstrates clear links between the mass gathering, attendees who tested positive, and the state’s largest COVID-19 cluster to date,” The Australian said.

According to the report, two Northland H&M employees who tested positive for COVID-19 attended the protests. These workers formed part of a larger cluster of coronavirus cases initially named as the H&M cluster but later reclassified as the North Melbourne family cluster.

It is the North Melbourne family cluster which the DHHS said was linked to the outbreak in the North Melbourne housing tower.

“Cases linked to the North Melbourne towers have links to other cases across Melbourne, including the North Melbourne family outbreak,” The Australian quotes a DHHS spokesman as saying.

“It is not clear which direction the virus was transmitted in. In many cases, we will never know for sure how large clusters began and the order in which the virus spread.”

The Australian’s report prompted former Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy to suggest Fact-check issue a correction on a past CoronaCheck newsletter, published in June, which queried the evidence for assertions about links between the protests and the surge in cases.

“[The DHHS] continues to report that the current burst of cases does not stem from the rally,” Fact-check said at the time.

“They have said that while one protester “may have been infectious at the rally”, two others who have since tested positive for COVID-19 were not infectious at the rally, nor is there evidence they contracted the virus at the rally.”

The DHHS statement last week maintains that there is “no evidence to suggest” any person contracted COVID-19 at the protest.

The report in The Australian, as well as similar reports from other news sites, were shared widely, including by Senator Pauline Hanson (leader of right-wing populist One Nation party), Victorian federal Liberal MP Jason Wood and Avi Yemini, a far-right figure with 115,000 Twitter followers.

Fact-check found no evidence that a follow up report from The Australian, which clarified that the DHHS said there was no evidence that the six protesters who had tested positive for COVID-19 had acquired the virus at the rally, was shared by Senator Hanson or Mr Wood. Mr Yemini dismissed the report in a tweet.

 

* “Those vertical towers” or “major public housing complex” refer to several large high-rise buildings which were put in total lockdown after an outbreak of COVID-19 was reported there. These buildings house people with low income, a large diversity of cultural backgrounds and many with immigrant/asylum-seeker status.

OUTDATED ADVICE MASKING THE FACTS

The surge in coronavirus cases in Victoria has led its government to announce that face coverings would be mandatory for residents of lockdown areas but commentators and social media activists are using out-of-date advice on the use of masks to peddle misinformation on mask use.
In a document published over three months ago, the World Health Organisation stated that “the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence”. This advice was the reason for Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt to question whether there was any medical basis to the decision to make masks mandatory.

However, new advice published by the organisation in June, says that masks should be worn by the general population where there is widespread community transmission or where physical distancing cannot be adhered to, such as on public transport or in “specific working conditions”.

Speaking to Seven News, infectious diseases physician and microbiologist Peter Collignon said there was enough community spread in Melbourne to justify mandatory masks. “Whenever you’ve got a lot of community transmission — and Melbourne seems to be in that situation at the moment — wearing masks makes a difference,” Professor Collignon said.

Nevertheless, Facebook groups popular with conspiracy theorists have used misinterpreted Federal Government advice, as well as months-old news reports, to advocate against mandatory mask-wearing.

FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.

When he resumed his regular coronavirus press briefing, President Trump also tried to blame Black Lives Matter protests for the coronavirus surge.

“There are likely a number of causes for the spike in infections,” he said. “Cases started to rise among young Americans shortly after demonstrations, which you know very well about, which presumably triggered a broader relaxation of mitigation efforts nationwide.”

The data suggests that they weren’t. According to the Washington Post, a working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found “no evidence that urban protests reignited COVID-19 case growth during the more than three weeks following protest onset.” Nor are the states where cases surged the most ones in which the largest protests occurred.

The Guardian took it one step further and noted that “Public health experts say there is little evidence that the protests spread Covid-19 in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington or other cities. They took place outdoors, where the virus spreads less easily, and most participants wore face masks, which Trump has conceded is an effective preventive measure.”

“Dhaval Dave, the lead author of a study at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, told the Associated Press that in many cities, the protests [ironicallyP seemed to lead to a net increase in physical distancing, as more people who did not protest decided to stay off the streets.”

Things that don’t cure and/or prevent COVID-19

#36: Burning Sage
“Though burning some plants has been scientifically shown to eliminate airborne bacterium, there is inconclusive evidence to suggest that burning sage – or “smudging” – is capable of purifying the air in confined spaces.” – Snopes

 

*The facts in this article are derived from the Australian RMIT ABC Fact Check newsletters which in turn draw on their own resources and those of their colleagues within the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), of which RMIT ABC Fact Check is a member.