Demystifying the myths about COVID-19 infection and its societal importance

Abstract

Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

Stigma related to COVID-19 infection: Are the Health Care Workers stigmatizing their own colleagues?

“…There are also reports from India of HCWs being denied a dignified funeral ( Lobo, 2020 ). The stigma associated with COVID-19 is attributed to the fear of being getting infected in the general population ( Sahoo et al, 2020 ). However, little is known about the stigma expressed by one group of HCWs towards others.…”

The myth that Nigerians are immune to SARS-CoV-2 and that COVID-19 is a hoax are putting lives at risk

“…Once this myth was presented and proven to be grossly inaccurate, with an even greater number of blacks being ravaged by the virus [ 7 ], many Nigerians nonetheless believed they had many problems but the virus was not one of them. The myth had evolved to the belief that the virus could not withstand the tropical climate of the country [ 4 ]. This had since been dispelled with the seeping in of the virus into the country and the rise of infections and deaths on a daily basis.…”

“…In this case of COVID-19, it has probably done more harm by its generation of gratuitous alarm and exploitation as evidenced by the spread of fear, offer of fake cures, and the dismissal of medical advice [ 3 ]. This is further exacerbated when these misleading messages are endorsed by influential people [ 4 ]. Consequently, in an effort to quell this tide of disinformation and soothe the fears of ignorant Nigerians buried in conspiracy theories, conventional mass media coverage in news and print media has been heightened by Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), the Federal and State governments.…”

Analysis and Insights for Myths Circulating on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…We particularly focus on the prevailing myths listed on WHO Mythbuster, and use the keywords of each myth to collect data from Twitter. According to the myth categorization in the letter to the editor of Asian Journal of Psychiatry [13], we separate the myths into 5 categories: the spread of infection, preventive measures, detection measures, treatments, and miscellaneous. We first analyze the most discussed topics in each category of myths.…”