Original article
Konstantin S. Sharov,
PhD, Senior Lecturer, Moscow State University,
Senior Researcher, Koltzov Institute of Developmental Biology of Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Address: 26 Vavilova st, Moscow 119334, Russia
E-mail: const.sharov@mail.ru
Article ID: 010640018
Published online: 21 May 2020
HANDLE: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12656/thebeacon.3.010640018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55269/thebeacon.3.010640018
Quoting (Chicago style): Sharov, Konstantin. 2020. “A Few Observations Upon COVID-19 Media Coverage Myths.” Beacon J Stud Ideol Ment Dimens 3, 010640018. https://doi.org/10.55269/thebeacon.3.010640018
Language: English
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WHO metrics on COVID-19 spread and consequences “Confirmed cases” and “Confirmed deaths” are highly deceptive. They delude not only the general public, but, what is more dangerous, leading world politicians. Their wrong coverage by mass media provokes unseen quarantine and self-isolation measures around the world, that may threaten the world economy and social order. A more comprehensive approach to withstanding the ideology of the Doomsday, is proposed in the article. Key words: COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, coronavirus pandemic, media myths, Internet, infodemic, fake news, false news, informational panic, globalisation
The current corona crisis instigated by many wrong attitudes in epidemiological containment of COVID-19, begot a number of social and media myths that direct human understanding to one particular side, i.e. terror and fear of the virus. In the paper, we analyse the peculiarities of mythological (ideological) media coverage of COVID-19 pandemic by world media and World Health Organisation as a media entity.
World Health Organisation (WHO) is partially responsible for creating a dis-torted picture of SARS-CoV-2 spreading across the world and its boosted epide-miological hazards. In spite of WHO has a special webpage “Mythbusters,” where myths about COVID-19 are deemed to be contradicted, the organisation provides a real-time information on COVID-19 disease, reduced just to two indicators, “Con-firmed cases” and “Confirmed deaths.” The third metric “Number of countries in-fected” seems to have little sense at all, as a priori one can anticipate that a virus with droplet transmission that was not contained at its very place of its outbreak, will finally be found in almost any country.
In February-March 2020, the Italian and Spanish scenarios were universally taken as a standard to which every country may (and possibly, will) inevitably come. That is a source of deception. To put aside healthcare considerations, Italy and Spain are countries with unusual social risk profile for a number of social and demographic reasons: 1) largest level of global tourism in the world; 2) enormous level of mi-gration from the Mediterranean, Near and Middle East to Europe; 3) poor eco-logical situation (for Northern Italy), i.e. severe air pollution concentrated on areas south of the Alps; 4) on 25 February Italian Ministry of Health adopted statistics gathering policies quite opposite to those that may have clarified the situation, i.e. the policies that prioritised testing for people with severe symptoms and almost cancelled testing for asymptomatic or mild symptomatic people. To be sure, that measure also made a large statistical skew towards increase of confirmed cases rate.
Wrong attitudes of many governments in containing COVID-19 gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories in population that instigated non-compliance with healthcare public policy measures. However, people are not to blame. Administra-tive efforts were mainly aimed at “controlling” humans to “protect” them. In reality, this “protection” is nothing more than a “protection” of Big Brother. COVID-19 is different from any other pandemics of the past in its “comprehensive” “real-time” mass media coverage. In reality, this coverage turns out to be not at all compre-hensive, quite the opposite. The statistical data on the pandemics of the past, from the Black Death of the fourteenth century in England to the “swine” flu H1N1 of 2008-2009 were available to humanity only a posteriori, after the data were checked, double-checked and presented in an appropriate form. Even twelve years ago, with H1N1 virus spread, we did not deal with “online” and “real-time” coverage, not to say about the pandemics of earlier times.
With all that taken into account, we can create a more realistic picture of COVID-19. It is to remember that the real virus is a something different from all its media “replicas” created within media myths.
© 2020 Konstantin S. Sharov. Licensee The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) that permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
