A doctor from a room in Illinois was accused in April of profiting from naming coronavirus as the cause of death of a patient, a rumor that spread online.
An internist in New York in May treated a vomiting patient who drank a bleach mixture as part of a fake virus cure found on YouTube.
And in June, a paramedic in Britain helped a clearly ill man who had refused to go to a hospital after reading misleading warnings about poor treatment of coronavirus on social media.
Doctors at the forefront of the global pandemic say they are not only fighting the coronavirus, but also increasingly fighting a never-ending grip of misinformation about the disease that patients do.
Before the pandemic, medical professionals were accustomed to dealing with patients who were misled by online information, a phenomenon they called Dr. Google. But in interviews, more than a dozen doctors and misinformation researchers in the United States and Europe said the volume was related to the virus as nothing they had seen before. They accuse leaders like President Trump of reinforcing frontal theories, the social media platforms for not doing enough to leak false information, and individuals to quickly believe what they see online.
Last week, researchers said at least 800 people worldwide died in the first three months of the year, and thousands more were hospitalized, from unfounded claims online that eating highly concentrated alcohol would kill the virus. Their findings, based on a study of rumors circulating on the Web, were published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Doctors’ frustrations fill Facebook groups and online forums. The American Medical Association and other groups representing physicians say that the false information that is disseminated online is damaging the public health response to the disease. The World Health Organization is developing methods to measure the damage of virus-related traffic information online, and over two weeks in July, the group held an online conference with doctors, public health experts and internet researchers on how to tackle the problem.
Doctors say that patients regularly change their advice, more inclined to believe what they read on Facebook than what a medical professional tells them. The falsifications, they say, have undermined efforts to get people to wear masks and instilled a belief that the severity of the disease is too great. Some doctors say they have been abused when they engage in online conversations to correct the record.
“This is no longer just an anecdotal observation made by some individual doctors,” said Daniel Allington, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and co-author of a recent study that found people getting their news online , instead of radio or television, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and did not follow public health guidelines. “This is a statistically significant pattern that we can observe in a large survey.”
Dr. Howard Mell, a doctor in the emergency room in a suburb of Illinois in St. Louis, said the wife of a man who died of coronavirus in April accused him of falsely filling out the death certificate to raise more money for himself. to make. He explained that the form was accurate and that his pay was not based on the cause of death.
“She screamed, ‘We’ve seen online how to get more money,'” Dr. Mell said.
Since then, the situation has not improved, he said. Several times a week, he meets someone who believes false medical information that was discovered online.
“It’s definitely become a job in itself,” said Dr. Mell, who is also a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, a group that represents ER physicians.
Some doctors say they are getting into arguments with patients who require prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine, the unproven drug that is by Mr. Trump. In some hospitals, people have come to ask for a note from a doctor so they do not have to wear a mask at work because they believe it will damage their oxygen level, another online rumor has it.
“Now the numbers have gone up again, and I feel like it has a lot to do with things on social media, as this is not a whole lot and we do not have to take all these steps,” said Dr. David Welsh, a surgeon in Indiana who has treated coronavirus patients, refers to a recent infection surgeon in his area.
Online platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have introduced policies to restrict coronavirus traffic information and increase information from trusted sources such as the World Health Organization. This month, Facebook and Twitter deleted a post by Mr Re -‘s re-election campaign. Trump who falsely claimed that children do not get coronavirus.
“We have been aggressive in removing harmful false pretenses and targeting people with authoritative information,” Facebook said in a statement. The company, which held a call with doctors in June to hear their concerns, said it had deleted more than seven million pieces of traffic information about viruses, and added warning labels to millions more.
YouTube said it was “dedicated to providing up-to-date and useful information about Covid-19” and had removed more than 200,000 dangerous or misleading videos.
But inaccurate information remains scattered. Last month, a video of a group of people calling themselves the American frontline doctors was viewed millions of times. It shared misleading claims about the virus, including that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for coronavirus and that masks do not slow the spread of the virus.
The scale of the problem led last month to a British parliamentary report that added to calls in the country for tougher laws against the major social media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube.
Dr. Ryan Stanton, a doctor in the emergency room in Kentucky, said a number of sick patients waited until it was almost too late to visit a hospital because they were convinced by what they had read online that Covid-19 was fake as “no big deal.”
“They thought it was just a ploy, a shame, a conspiracy,” Dr. Stanton recalled. “It just remained that I could turn on these blinders and ignore the facts.”
Thomas Knowles, a paramedic in Britain, said a person refused to be admitted in June after reading that hospitals would make his condition worse. The incident so caused Mr Knowles to search social media for virus-related misinformation, where he countered false claims such as doctors taking blood from people for examination and then killing them.
“I have never personally met such strong, consistent – and so clearly coordinated from anywhere – people who are so retarded in their false beliefs,” said Mr. Knowles.
Some doctors in cities like New York said the volume of patients believing that misinformation was declining as the disease swept their territory. But, they said, it remained a tricky trend.
Dr Parinda Warikarn, who works at Elmhurst Hospital Center in New York, said the patient who had been admitted to the hospital after seeing the false treatment on YouTube came in with severe abdominal pain.
“He clearly really believed he would avoid Covid,” she said. “Fortunately, his wife and two young children did not take this solution.”
A growing fear is that vaccination conspiracy theories could undermine any vaccination efforts, said Dr John Wright of the Bradford Institute for Health Research in England.
“Social media brings a lot of great things, but it also provides a platform to sow the seeds of doubt, and that’s what happened,” he said.
Dr Wright recalls that Congolese immigrants believed a rumor on social media that Covid-19 was a government ploy to deport them, and that others, from the Indian community, posted messages about doctors infecting patients. A nurse at the hospital complained on Facebook about people posting names and photos of health workers accusing them of leaving patients to die.
Dr. Mell, the doctor in Illinois, regularly encounters abuse by Facebook users when he has backtracked on false information. But he is of the opinion that the effort is necessary to spread falsehoods.
“Doctors need to continue to speak the truth as loudly as we can,” he said. “People need to hear it.”
