Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Feb 26, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 2, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 6, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
COVID- 19 misinformation on the internet: The other epidemy
ABSTRACT
Background:
The internet has become an important source of health information for users worldwide, the novel Wuhan virus caused a pandemic search for information with broad dissemination of false or misleading health information.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to evaluate the quality and readability of online information about Wuhan Coronavirus (actually COVID-19), which was a trending topic in the net, using validated instruments and relate the quality of information to its readability.
Methods:
The search was based on the term Wuhan Coronavirus on the Google website (6 February 2020). Critical analysis was performed on the first 110 hits using HON code, JAMA benchmark, DISCERN instrument, and Google rank.
Results:
The Google search returned 309,000,000 hits, the first 110 websites were critically analyzed, only 1.81% of the websites had the HONE code seal. The JAMA benchmark showed that 43 websites did not have any of the categories required by this tool and only 11 of the websites had the four quality criteria required by JAMA. The DISCERN score showed that 51.81% of the websites were evaluated as very poor and 0.9% rated as excellent.
Conclusions:
Users and the scientific community need to be aware of the quality of the information they read and produce respectively. The Wuhan Coronavirus health crisis misinformation was produced by the media and the misinformation the users obtain from the net. The use of the internet has a risk to public health and in cases like this, the trending topic time lasted while no quality information was available.
Citation
