Battling Infodemic Online
By Jimmy Kudo
Malaysia Personal Narrative
“Do you know why the U.S. will never be successful in controlling any respiratory outbreak”? My mother asked me one day. “No,” I replied. “Because they only cared about ‘human rights’,” she answered. Soon enough, the COVID-19 pandemic occurred and I finally saw what she meant.
“Life is all about taking risks and death is part of life” is one of the most common arguments made by Americans, especially anti-maskers. “Wear a mask, so that you can live on to tell the tale to your children and grandchildren,” I argued back. I was proven right. Today, I am able to live and tell my story about COVID-19.
My grandfather was an orphan and also one of the World War II survivors. After World War II, many children did not have the mood to study, including my grandfather. However, his foster parents made him study and my grandfather was able to get a decent job. Thus, he was able to live on until today.
In 2015, Bill Gates warned us about the next “war”, which he said that it would be a medical war instead of a physical war. In March 2020, after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a pandemic, many local schools in Malaysia were closed, except for my university. Many of my schoolmates demanded for the university to close as well, as they were unable to enter campus. A few of my closest friends did not have the mood to study. One of my closest friends was deciding to defer study to next year, hoping that the pandemic would end by next year. Luckily, I managed to comfort her and gave her confidence to endure the whole semester. I recalled Bill Gates’ warning in 2015. He was right. This is war. The thought of being in a war brought me back to my grandfather’s situation after the World War II and I followed my grandfather’s footsteps to endure that semester.
At the same time, I checked Twitter to see what President Donald Trump had to tweet. To my anger, he tweeted “slow down the testing”, as the number of COVID-19 cases were very high at that time. I knew that he asked his officials to slow down the testing, so that the U.S. appeared to have low number of cases. Next thing I knew, many people tweeted regarding the reluctance to wear masks. I kept urging people to wear mask to save lives and asked them to be considerate towards other people. In response, those people argued that people who didn’t want to be infected should stay at home and I urged them to be considerate towards their parents. Some of them argued about being given the “right” to wear mask and that was when I recalled what my mother had told me.
Some people shared controversial videos of ineffectiveness of masks, such as one by “Doctor” Ted Noel. I emailed him to request him to remove the video, because the video was spreading misinformation about masks. After the debate with him, I made a mental note that “doctors” like him were not deserved to be called “doctors”, because doctors would attempt to save lives, but “doctors” like him were discouraging people to wear mask in order to achieve “herd immunity” by following Sweden’s example. Others constantly pointed out that Swedes did not wear mask or social distanced, but their daily cases have been constantly decreasing. I pointed out that most of the elderlies died of COVID-19, so there was no point in “herd immunity”.
Some time later, the U.S.’s CDC published a statistics of proportion of people died from COVID-19. As expected, those anti-maskers and pro-rights group of people deliberately misinterpreted the statistics, “CDC quietly updated the number of people died from COVID-19.” They downplayed the severity of COVID-19 that the “mortality rate” was only “6%”. I explained that the CDC was merely categorizing the deaths from COVID-19 into those with and without pre-existing conditions.
Since then, I have endured that whole semester and the following semester. With a blink of an eye, I’m now safe and healthy in my final year final semester of my Medical Bioscience course. The vaccines have been developed and we are all on our way back to normalcy. I strongly encourage everyone reading this story to be vaccinated as soon as possible. We all want herd immunity and be immune to the virus, don’t we? So, what are you waiting for? Go register for vaccination now!
I hope everyone stay safe and stay healthy.