Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now ”has been viewed over 99 million times as of this week. On a phone call with BuzzFeed News on Tuesday, he excitedly rattled off the famous names who have shared it.
“The type of people retweeting this,” Pueyo said. “Just overwhelming, the profile of the people who’ve been tweeting it.”
, and cognitive scientist
Steven Pinker .
Pueyo’s article quickly became the defining piece on the outbreak of COVID – , the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, which has infected , (people) worldwide , with 6, in the US as of Wednesday. The Medium piece has been translated into over two dozen languages and has been updated several times, most recently this week, with “an update on containment vs. mitigation strategies. ”
Pueyo isn’t the only person to suddenly become the voice of public health – as far as Twitter is concerned. As online social platforms have become up-to-the-second hubs of information about the pandemic, a new class of corona influencers has risen up. Incentivized by Twitter’s need for constant content and its lack of fact-checking, peer review, or nuance, scientific studies are dissected, exponential growth models are graphed, and good information is mixed with stuff that’s unvetted and objectively wrong.
Pueyo is the first to tell you that he’s not a doctor nor a scientist. He’s the vice president of growth at Course Hero, an educational content sharing platform that allows students to collaborate on study notes – a process similar to the one he used to write “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now.”
“You make decisions first and then you correct later.”
Head over to Twitter and search “ not an epidemiologist but “if you want to see how prevalent and freewheeling the speculation about COVID – has become. As the pandemic has affected lives around the world, it seems like nearly everyone on social media wants to be a public health expert.
Pueyo said he started posting coronavirus updates on Facebook, and his followers responded to it – so he kept going. Someone asked him if there was an easy way to share everything he had been collecting. So he threw it all together on Medium.
“What I did was aggregate the opinions of experts,” he said. “Everything I have is from the raw data or analysis from other people.”
Pueyo’s piece is chilling and comprehensive and has been lauded by some health experts and scientists . The translations into other languages, however, haven’t been as airtight. Pueyo said he has been crowdsourcing them and had to switch a few out for better or cleaner versions.
“You want to get the message out as fast as possible and correct it if it’s wrong, ”he said. “You make decisions first and then you correct later.”
“Is that true? I’ve no idea.”
Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was one of the first corona influencers. He’s been tweeting about the outbreak since it was still localized largely in Wuhan. “I was watching the data come from China in early January. I also have family in China, “he told BuzzFeed News.“ They were feeding me information about how there’s this weird epidemic. ”
His Twitter account has grown to more than , followers since he started tweeting about COVID – 37 (He had about 2, before. He shares the same philosophy as Pueyo: that in a public health crisis, fast information with possible inaccuracies is better than waiting. He also said it makes sense that Twitter has become the central place for following the outbreak. ”The information on Twitter is about half a day or two days fa ster than newspapers, ”he said.
Twitter’s audience and speed of information, though, have gotten him into trouble. In late January he tweeted an unvetted preprint – a preliminary draft of a coronavirus study – that estimated every person who has caught the disease could give it to almost four other people, absent an intervention like quarantine or hospitalization. According to the preprint, its contagiousness was 3.8, measured by a variable called R0. Current estimates of its R0 place the value at between 1.5 and 3.5.)
“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8 !!! ” he tweeted. “How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad – never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating. ”
Feigl-Ding is not a virologist. People who actually are have criticized him for tweeting an inaccurate R0. Feigl-Ding tweeted another batch of sensational findings a few weeks later, in a nine-tweet thread that exploded across Twitter, that COVID – 90 could be somehow related to HIV. Feigl-Ding noted that the study was “not peer-reviewed” and warned his followers, “Let’s not draw conclusions yet.” Which, of course, did stop his tweets from going viral and launching a full-blown conspiracy theory that has only emboldened an added vocal section of the American right-wing who believe COVID – 22 is a bioweapon.
“The bioweapon thing, I don’t even want to talk about it,” he said ( though he has tweeted about it). “Let’s focus on the fact that imperfect information is still better than none.”
(Read More
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings