Dealing With Information in the age of Covid-19

COVID has created a lot of confusion for people.  Confusion for patients, confusion for the media, and confusion for people knowing what to do or not do. 

Depending on who you listen to, COVID-19 is either the worst plague that has ever hit humanity or it is just a mild virus and everything is over-blown. 

How can we know the truth?  Even doctors don’t seem to agree with each other.   

This is a great question and one that is not only about COVID-19 but about many things in our lives.   Here is the way NOT to understand it.  Get on social media and go down the rabbit hole. 

You know what I mean.  Social media is doing a great job at dividing us. 

Social media content supports whatever you want it to support.  You can find every reason to back up and “prove” what you already thought.  Then you simply unfriend, block, or stop following everyone who disagrees with you and voila you have created the perfect scenario for misunderstanding the facts.   

If we are not careful we can become not thinkers, but followers of propaganda.   We can become believers of whatever we see, read, or hear because as everyone knows the internet and social media never lie.   

“Everything you read on social media is true.”

-Abraham Lincoln 

Don’t believe me, try this experiment.  Go to Fox News and read the headlines for the day.  Now go to CNN and read the headlines for the day.  Does it even seem like you are reading the same news?   The facts are the same, the actual news which is occurring is the same and yet it seems like there is a stark difference in the reporting.   Someone is trying to persuade you.   Crazy eh? 

What is the solution, how can we know the truth?

Be open minded enough to to realize what you are seeing, hearing, or reading may not be the whole truth.  That the person putting out the information may have an agenda which is not just education.  

Get your education from more than one source.  Be open to the idea that maybe the truth is in the middle of the rhetoric spectrum.  

Try and get your information from reliable sources.  If an article or post says “The CDC says…..”. then go to the CDC site and see what they actually say instead of the interpretation of what they supposedly said.   If you read that “A new study finds that…..” Go directly to the study and see what the findings are.  Many times they will not be the same as the headline.  

If you do not have time to do all of that, find someone you trust who is a professional and does take the time and listen to them.   Make sure it is someone who looks at both sides of an issue and then gives wisdom not just information based on the data.   

It’s not surprising we are confused.   This is a new virus we have not dealt with before.  Information comes quickly and changes often as we learn more about morbidity, mortality, prevention, and treatment.   This is normal with a new disease.   It would be unusual if it were not true. 

Learn to roll with the punches, be open to change as information changes.    

In addition people have politicized science for their own agendas which sucks.   

That does not mean you and I have to be part of that.  Educate yourself, don’t indulge silly nonsense, be open and willing to be wrong.  At the end of the day, this too will pass.  

Keep Living Every Minute,

Dr. Tim