Politics Plus

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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Again, there seems to be little fact-checking done this week; not because there is less misinformation, disinformation or even malinformation about, I think, but because it loses in strength every time it looks like it repeats itself within a small window of time. Fact-checkers are trying to avoid that their readers get bored or think it an actual repeat and skip it, l expect and not giving up hope that their efforts to debunk are having results.

Most of what was reported this week was Australian based again, but some items are of interest elsewhere and are included in this overview.

 

HAS THE CSIRO’S PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS BEEN HAMPERED BY FUNDING CUTS?

As efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine continue, Australian Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has used a National Press Club address to call for better pandemic preparedness.

Mr Albanese said the Coalition Government’s first budget had cut $110 million from science funding and “hollowed out” the nation’s lead scientific agency, the CSIRO, one on the frontline in the groups responding to the coronavirus that Australia was “now counting on” to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.

Its recent work includes a collaboration with the University of Queensland to develop a vaccine based on so-called “molecular clamp” technology. The agency is also conducting pre-clinical trials for two separate vaccines.

However, Dr Trevor Drew recently told the ABC’s Four Corners program that cuts in 2014 had “impacted on the research capability” of the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, the CSIRO’s high-containment facility for studying deadly viruses, of which he was director.

Fact-check took a look at the 2014-15 budget papers, which show the newly-elected Abbott government had earmarked $111.4 million in “reduced funding” for the CSIRO over the four years from 2014-15. The CSIRO’s annual reports confirm the agency lost $60 million in nominal government revenue in the first two budget years alone.

In the year after the 2014-15 budget, the agency shed 11 per cent of its research staff and 12 per cent of its total workforce, not counting contractors. Some jobs have since returned but, five years on, there remained 215 fewer research staff than before the Coalition took office.

But while Mr Albanese linked the funding cuts to the agency’s role in developing a coronavirus vaccine, a CSIRO spokesman implied that the cuts had resulted in a reorganisation in “areas related to vaccine development and pandemic preparedness”, where “[a]s part of the creation of our new strategy in 2015, CSIRO brought together experts from a range of backgrounds to build a ‘one health’ model that could respond to a new disease threat in multiple ways, from vaccine development and medical supply production to data modelling and environmental science.”

“As a result, our overall capability in pandemic preparedness has expanded, including an increase in research staff working on human diseases.” In short, the cuts resulted in a far more efficient organisation.

The current pandemic has also led the Morrison Government to put aside $222 million to upgrade the CSIRO’s ageing containment facility and a further $66 million for future pandemic planning and research in a bid to develop a vaccine and treatments for COVID-19.

 

WHY WE NEED TO BE WARY OF THE DATA

COVID-19 is evidently impacting countries to varying degrees. Differences in preparedness, population density and the quality of national healthcare systems, as well as in the how governments respond to the pandemic, have led to marked differences in outcomes.

So stark is the contrast that, had Australia’s coronavirus path tracked similarly to Belgium’s, the nation would have recorded more than 21,000 deaths – more than 200 times its current toll of 104.

The figures are extrapolations based on data that tracks the number of coronavirus deaths per million of population.

While experts caution that variables in the way countries compile their statistics and in their definitions, as well as variations in demographics and cultural norms, make for inexact comparisons, deaths-per-million gives a clearer snapshot of how severely the coronavirus is impacting different jurisdictions.

For example, the US tops the global death count with around 130,000 fatalities, with Brazil having swiftly climbed to second place (60,000). But, as bleak as those figures are, they translate to 388 and 284 deaths per million of the population respectively, ranking both countries behind Belgium, the UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden and France.

Image source: Our World in Data

Again caution is called for. Belgium’s figures include suspected – as well as confirmed – coronavirus deaths in care homes, which is likely inflating the country’s toll. Also, figures are subject to sudden change as countries reassess definitions and revise their data, as was the case in China, where authorities revised upwards by 50 per cent coronavirus totals for the city of Wuhan when they realised that their case definition was so stringent.

Likewise, New York City; it added more than 3,700 deaths to its COVID-19 toll in one stroke after new guidance from US health authorities recommended taking into account “probable” and “presumed” coronavirus deaths even in the absence of testing.

Figures for some countries are also likely unreliable due to poor accounting or because, with healthcare systems overwhelmed, untold numbers of people have been left to die at home.

While the Swedish Government shared the global objective of flattening the coronavirus curve, the debate continues over the merits of its approach. Its 5,333 deaths to date (523 per million people) far exceed the per capita tolls of neighbouring Denmark (104 deaths per million), Finland (59) and Norway (47).

 

A QUICK PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

A viral Facebook post claims that police have issued a bulletin about door-knocking thieves who say to be part of a government initiative to distribute masks is false, according to fact-checkers at AFP Australia, Full Fact and Reuters in the UK, and PolitiFact in the US. The masks they hand out are supposedly laced with chemicals “which knocks you out cold and once you’re knocked out they proceed to rob you”.

In a statement provided to AFP, a Victoria Police spokesperson said the force was “unaware of any instances of this nature” occurring in Victoria. Other global fact-checkers were unable to find any such police bulletin.

 

FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.

The notion that COVID-19 very rarely leads to serious illness or death, a favourite argument of those wanting coronavirus restrictions eased or lifted, has been shared by US President Donald Trump when speaking on US Independence Day, July 4, and claiming that 99 per cent of coronavirus cases in the United States was “totally harmless“; a fact, he said, that was unique to the US.

But fact-checkers at PolitiFact, the Associated Press and FactCheck.org disputed this statement.

According to FactCheck.org, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that through to May 30, 14 per cent of coronavirus cases led to hospitalisation, and 2 per cent required intensive care. Meanwhile, PolitiFact estimated the case fatality rate for confirmed cases in the US to be at least 4.2 per cent. And while some experts do put the death rate around 1 per cent, that is not the same as the coronavirus being “totally harmless” in 99 per cent of cases.

“To cavalierly say that only 1 per cent of infections result in problems is wildly inaccurate,” Donald Thea, a professor of Global Health at Boston University told PolitiFact. “We are seeing reports of young people who have recovered from mild cases developing diabetes or blood clots and suffering from chronic fatigue, respiratory compromise, persistent fever or coming back with bacterial sepsis weeks later. There’s too many reports of other organ damage that hints that there are possible long term serious implications.”

 

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

#33: Vaccines against pneumonia
“Vaccines against pneumonia, such as pneumococcal vaccine and Haemophilus influenza type B (Hib) vaccine, do not provide protection against the new coronavirus.” ⁠— World Health Organisation

 

*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.

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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ASYMPTOMATIC COVID-19 CARRIERS DO INFECT OTHERS — BUT DETAILS ARE STILL UNKNOWN

Image source: Facebook

Six months after the novel coronavirus outbreak was first identified, scientists and health authorities still have to answer major questions about it. One is: how easily can asymptomatic carriers pass the virus onto others?

Fact-checkers at PolitiFact found a claim that the World Health Organisation  “now admits that asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is very rare” to be only half true. An official of the WHO did make that comment on June 8: “They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward — it’s very rare.”, but when seeking to clarify her comments, she said she had been referring data in the subset of studies as well as unpublished data, not the of transmissions as such.

FactCheck.org also unpacked the official’s statements, concluding: “It is well documented that people without symptoms can transmit SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But it is not yet known how often that happens, or how frequently that involves someone who is completely asymptomatic.”

 

IN AUSTRALIA, A VIRUS SPIKE IS LINKED TO FAMILIES, NOT TO BLACK LIVES MATTER RALLY

Image source: ABC News/Will Jackson

With COVID-19 case numbers on the rise in one of Australia’s states, Victoria, some people have drawn an unsubstantiated link between the spike and the large Black Lives Matter protest held in its capital Melbourne on June 6.

Tweeting this week, Liberal⁺ senator Sarah Henderson said:  “Daniel Andrews blames law abiding Victorian families for doing the wrong thing rather than 10,000 illegal protesters?”

A number of Senator Henderson’s Liberal Party⁺ colleagues, as well as Evan Mulholland of the Institute of Public Affairs, tweeted similar criticisms, while headlines have also declared that the “upsurge in COVID cases [is] linked to Melbourne Black Lives Matter protests”.

But these declarations contradict the guidance of officials of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, who continue to report that the current burst of cases does not stem from the rally. 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. Rather the increase in cases have been linked to family gatherings, citing family spread as the “main cause” of 120 cases in the week to June 22, by not following advice around physical distancing, hygiene and limiting the number of people invited into the home.

Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Nick Coatsworth, also dismissed claims the spike could be linked to the protests, telling reporters that “there is no evidence that there have been chains of community transmission that we are aware of through the Black Lives Matter protests”.^§

⁺ The Liberal party is part of the Coalition which currently forms the centre-right Australian Federal Government, where the liberal parties of Europe can also be found.

^§Despite great opposition of the federal and state governments to these protests, people took to the streets in exceptionally great numbers in the states which had very low transmissions at the time. No other cases of contraction of the new coronavirus were linked to any of the other rallies.

 

BLM AND COVID-19 CONVERGE IN THE US

Image source: Supplied

In the US, where the coronavirus pandemic has hit hard and momentum continues to build for the Black Lives Matter movement, the convergence of the two events has inevitably led to the spread of more misinformation, complete with a conspiracy theory involving Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Fact-checkers at Reuters have found a claim that Melinda Gates, wife of Bill, said that “black people must be vaccinated first” for COVID-19 misleading. The claim appeared on Facebook as protesters took to the streets in the US as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

What Ms Gates told TIME magazine was that, after healthcare workers, black people and other people of colour should have priority access to a vaccine in the US as they were being disproportionately affected by the virus.

Meanwhile, a claim that George Floyd’s murder must have been filmed before the coronavirus crisis, because no-one in the video is wearing a face mask, has been rated “pants on fire” by PolitiFact. They found that bystanders seen in the video were indeed wearing masks, even though it was filmed one day before Minneapolis started requiring people to wear the protective coverings in indoor public spaces.

 

STILL NO EVIDENCE THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS WAS CREATED IN A LAB

Image source: LifeSiteNews

Claims that the novel coronavirus was created in and released from a lab in Wuhan, China, continue to circulate, despite scientific consensus that the virus more likely originated in nature.

In one “exclusive article” published by Canadian Christian website LifeSiteNews, a headline — “Virus researchers uncover new evidence implying COVID-19 was created in a lab” —  misrepresents a yet-to-be peer-reviewed Australian study, according to the researchers. While the research did conclude that the unintentional release of COVID-19 from a lab could have happened, it did not imply it was the most likely option nor did it suggest that other possibilities were unlikely as LifeSiteNews suggested.

Flinders University’s Nikolai Petrovsky, one of the authors of the study, told RMIT ABC Fact Check: “We can only speculate as to what this finding means in terms of origin of the virus.”

Meanwhile, fact-checkers at Full Fact have said that despite some claims, peer-reviewed research from Norway had not found the virus to have been artificially engineered.

The claims had reportedly appeared in an earlier, non-peer-reviewed version of the study, and were aired in the Norwegian press by one of the study’s authors. However, the final version of the paper “doesn’t actually make any claims about whether the virus was natural or man-made in its current form”, according to the fact-checkers.

“The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered,” they added.

 

ANTI-AFRICAN SENTIMENT SPREADS IN CHINA

The Washington Post Fact-checker has found that despite assurances from officials, black and African residents of the Chinese city of Guangzhou have been the subject of a targeted crackdown over fears they are spreading the coronavirus.

In one incident caught on film, a McDonald’s store in the city displayed a sign informing patrons that “black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant”. Meanwhile, a pizza shop owner wrote on LinkedIn that local authorities had told him to refuse dine-in service to foreigners, “especially black people”.

According to the Washington Post, officials claimed such events were the result of a “miscommunication”.

But the fact-checkers found that as reports emerged in early April of Nigerian men testing positive for the virus in Guangzhou, anti-African sentiment started spreading on Chinese social media, with a reported uptick in posts using the n-word and referring to “illegals”.

A landlord has received instructions to report any black people in their building to authorities, while an African-Canadian man in the city said he had been confronted by officials in his home and refused entry to the subway. Yet Chinese state media said reports of discrimination were “fake news” and a police officer “assured the public that all foreigners in Guangzhou were treated equally to Chinese nationals”.

However, the bottom line was that “Africans and the larger black community in Guangzhou faced evictions, discrimination and the restriction of their movements on the basis of the colour of their skin over coronavirus fears”.

 

FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.

The US continues to hold the bleak title of the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases (more than 2 million) as well as deaths (more than 120,000), but that hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump from claiming the outbreak is worse elsewhere.

Speaking on June 5, Mr Trump said that the city of Tijuana, which lies on the westernmost point of Mexico’s border with the US, was the “most heavily infected place anywhere in the world, as far as the plague is concerned”.

FactCheck.org found that claim to be inaccurate, and that even the US city nearest to Tijuana, San Diego, had more cases and a higher rate of infection, though it had recorded fewer deaths.

In the District of Columbia, where Mr Trump lives in the White House, the rate of COVID-19 infection was 10 times higher than that of Tijuana, the fact-checkers found, while in Queens County, New York, a virus hotpot, the rate was 21 times higher.

Despite his claims being debunked, President Donald Trump has continued to argue at his much-hyped campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that the coronavirus outbreak is worse elsewhere, suggesting that widespread testing had led to higher numbers of COVID-19 cases being recorded.

“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” he said, echoing comments he made a few days earlier at a White House round-table discussion, and on Twitter.

“We will show more — more cases when other countries have far more cases than we do; they just don’t talk about it.”

But PolitiFact found that while the US has conducted a large volume of testing, this simply reflected the extent of the outbreak in the country. “A way to understand this: the number of tests necessary to identify a positive case,” the fact-checkers said. “If it’s easier to find a positive case, that suggests the virus has spread further and more testing is necessary to track the spread of COVID-19.”

According to a fact check compiled by the New York Times, the US on average returns one positive case every 21 tests, whereas Italy, another country hit hard by the virus, is recording one positive case in every 188 tests.

  

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

#31: Cold weather and snow
“There is no reason to believe that cold weather can kill the new coronavirus or other diseases.” ⁠— World Health Organisation

#32: Taking a hot bath
“Taking a hot bath will not prevent you from catching COVID-19. Your normal body temperature remains around 36.5°C to 37°C, regardless of the temperature of your bath or shower. Actually, taking a hot bath with extremely hot water can be harmful, as it can burn you.” ⁠— World Health Organisation

 

*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.