Surgical Practice | 2021
Welcome to the era of infodemic
Abstract
Do you know what is “spike protein”? Do you understand how “mRNA vaccine” works? What is the type of adenovirus used for Oxford-AstraZeneca AZD1222 vaccine? Have you heard about the terms “infodemic” and “infodemiology”? I was surprised that many clinicians that I personally know of were not able to answer the three COVID-19 vaccine-related questions, although some of them had diligently received the injection of vaccine in one of the Community Vaccination Centres in Hong Kong. Personally, I admired their full confidence in scientific advancements but I also found their loss of curiosity disturbing. According to Oxford English Dictionary online, “infodemic” means a proliferation of diverse, often unsubstantiated information relating to a crisis, controversy, or event, which disseminates rapidly and uncontrollably through news, online, and social media, and is regarded as intensifying public speculation or anxiety. It was a term coined by David J. Rothkopf to describe the explosion of information (and misinformation) associated with the SARS epidemic of 2003 in the Washington Post. On the other hand, “infodemiology” is a research discipline and methodology to study the determinants and distribution of health information as well as misinformation, which may in turn useful in guiding health professionals and patient to quality health information on the Internet. Many experts (including our local experts in the Chief Executive s expert advisory panel) have indicated with mass vaccination and achievement of herd immunity should bring a lasting control on the COVID-19 pandemic. The success story in Israel is an good example and our friends in United Kingdom are now catching up in terms of vaccination up-take. Also, with the dropping of R0 in Hong Kong and our local vaccination programme, we may have some lifting of various restrictions that help stop the coronavirus from spreading. It is almost time we should think about what we should do in the recovery phase from this unprecedented pandemic. It has been 15 months since we identified the first imported case of COVID-19 in Hong Kong on January 22, 2020. COVID-19 has brought significant changes in the healthcare system and in the post-COVID era, we need to have some strategies to heal the damage (both physically and psychologically), live with the new normal, and prepare for a come-back of COVID-19 or other new pandemic. Such strategies should address various aspects of the lives of our citizens, from emotional to financial. One thing for certain is that for the healthcare sector, we need a system approach to deal with the problems ahead. One particular area that I think the healthcare professionals in different countries should seriously consider is how to feed correct, evidence-based and scientific-based information to the public. In many places, this task has been left to the politicians, government officials and non-medical key opinion leaders. We should have our local version of Mythbusters from WHO. Perhaps for Hong Kong, we can try to convince the Hospital Authority, Medical Schools and the colleges under the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine to join forces and create a platform to deliver trustworthy information for our citizens. We are now approaching the one-year anniversary of the arson attacks of 5G towers in the UK. There might be people out there who still believe the conspiracy theory linking the spread of the coronavirus to 5G wireless technology. We should not allow the same thing to happen again. For the health of our community and our citizens, we should come together and stop misinformation and myths from harming us.