Negative impact of social media panic during the COVID-19 outbreak in India

作者：Abhay Kadam, Sachin Atre · 发表于：Journal of Travel Medicine · 年份：2020 · 被引用次数：141 · 研究领域：COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts、Misinformation and Its Impacts、Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy

Dear Editor, we read with interest the article titled ‘The pandemic of social media panic travels faster than the COVID-19 outbreak’.1 We agree with the authors and here we aim to provide an account of social media and societal response to COVID-19 that affected its control measures in India—a country which has over 350 million social media users and a large proportion of which are unaware about fact checking sources.2 Over the last decade, social media has played a crucial role in spreading awareness and knowledge about public health; however, it has also been misused for spreading fake news, hatred and creating racism during epidemics and civil unrest.1–4 Even before the detection of first case of COVID-19 in India, the epidemic of social media panic hit India, which led to stock out of masks and sanitizers from the market. Further, fake claims about transmission of virus through air and its survival on different surfaces5 created a panic. Though people started wearing different types of masks such as N95, surgical and simple cloth masks, many had lack of knowledge about their appropriate use and disposal which was evident from actions such as frequent touching to mask, use of same mask for more than a day, reuse of disposable masks and throwing the masks on the roads or in regular dust bins. Besides, an unwarranted use of N95 masks by common people during travelling and daily activities resulted in the shortage for frontline healthcare workers who actually needed those. Su...