Coronavirus is a global scare now. There are no signs yet that the outbreak of 2019-novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has been contained in Wuhan, the epicentre of the epidemic in China.
The fact that the administration has been selective in providing information to international agencies and media — despite Chinese President Xi Jinping’s public statement of keeping the fight against coronavirus outbreak a transparent affair – misinformation has taken the centre-stage on social media.
Many conspiracy theories are doing rounds on Facebook, Twitter WhatsApp and their Chinese parallels.
Scientific magazine Nature has quoted international health workers as saying that the case-report data that are being released by the Chinese authorities are incomplete. Researchers are struggling to accurately model the outbreak and predict how it might unfold.
This has given a field day to misinformation – due to lack of credible information – and conspiracy theories attributing the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak to leakage of biological weapon and what Chinese people eat.
A LEAKAGE OF BIO-WEAPON
This could be a case of fear-mongering at a time when health authorities around the world are on tenterhooks over the outbreak of coronavirus infection spreading from Hubei province of China.
The Washington Times published reports quoting a former Israeli intelligence officer to theorise that the coronavirus outbreak is actually the result of an escape of a biological weapon from a “mystery” lab in Wuhan.
That “mystery” lab is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wuhan is the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak. The former Israeli spy has been identified in the reports as an expert in virology (study of viruses) and claims that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been engaged in development of secret biological weapon for Chinese military.
However, no health agency has backed their claim, which continued to gain traction from the fact that the authorities have pinpointed the source of Novel coronavirus — from animals to humans – in a fish and animal market some 25-30 km from the virology lab.
It was in this fish and animal market that the coronavirus is believed to have infected humans first in early December. But alarm bells started ringing only on January 20, when 14 health workers treating pneumonia patients were reported ill. This was the first instance when human-to-human infection of coronavirus was confirmed in the current outbreak.
People wearing masks in a Japanese park the wake of coronavirus outbreaak in China. Japan has reported first confirmed case of coronavirus. The patient is a bus driver who ferried two groups of Chinese tourists in Japan. (Photo: PTI)
ESPIONAGE WITH CANADA CONNECTION
Another widely circulated theory of the coronavirus outbreak emerges from the sacking of two Chinese scientist couple working with the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Canada.
They along with their students had been sacked last year and escorted out of the building of the Winnipeg lab for suspected policy breach.
Now, many social media influencers are claiming that the Chinese scientists had sent coronavirus to Wuhan lab, the only Level-4 lab in China, last year.
The coronavirus escaped the Wuhan lab, it is being claimed, largely because the Chinese scientists lacked expertise in dealing with this particular virus, which is highly mutable strand of RNA (ribonucleic acid, which is protein with genetic properties).
The Canadian government has refuted such reports as “misinformation”.
PHARMA CONSPIRACY
Soon after the coronavirus outbreak hit headlines across the globe, also surfaced claims linking it with a patent by the Pirbright Institute in England. The patent was filed in 2015 for developing a version of coronavirus for treatment of respiratory infections and diseases.
Conspiracy theorists called it a planned outbreak for the gain of pharma companies involved with coronavirus vaccination. They linked it with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is said to have funded both the Pirbright Institute and vaccine development.
BAT SOUP
One video clip and a screengrab of it showing a woman eating bat are being circulated with claims that the current strand of coronavirus has reached humans due to the eating habits of the Chinese people.
The woman is heard saying in the video that the cooked bat tastes like chicken meat. Some factchekers have traced the video to a Palau in western Pacific Ocean, and dated some time in 2016. The video is completely unrelated to Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
The fact that the authorities identified an animal market as the source of coronavirus outbreak and that bats could be a possible origin point have made people believe in misinformation coming with the old video.
BIGGER THAN CHINESE PROJECTION
In the backdrop of the Nature magazine saying that researchers are finding it difficult to gauge the extent and severity of the coronavirus outbreak due to controlled release of data and information by the Chinese authorities, a “Wuhan nurse” video is doing round with claims that more than 90,000 people have been infected with the 2019-novel coronavirus.
This is about 15 times more the figure of infected people put out by the Chinese government. According to official data, over 6,000 people have contracted the coronavirus infection and close to 130 deaths so far.
The video is said to be recorded by a nurse working in a Wuhan hospital. She is wearing a protective mask and does not identify herself as a health worker in the video, whose English translation is getting much traction on social media.
The authenticity of the video remains unverified mainly due to complete lockdown of Wuhan city and Hubei province of China.
But for the claim about the number of coronavirus infected people to be true, the R0 or R-naught need to be many times higher than what the World Health Organisation (WHO) said last week.
R0 refers to the number of people that the virus tends to infect from an already infected person.
The WHO said the current corornavirus has an estimated R0 of 1.4 to 2.5. For 90,000 people to have been infected since the outbreak of coronavirus, R0 should be around 14-15.
