Docs no Better Than Patients at Ferreting Out Fake Coronavirus News

But there’s fake and there’s FAKE.

What would you say if I told you that a new study shows that individuals with acute kidney injury due to COVID-19 recover faster than those with AKI due to other causes? What if I told you that a new study shows that a quartz crystal placed on your bedside table reduces transmission of COVID-19 by 50%?

These statements are both false, by the way, but I hope you realize they are not false in quite the same way. There is something blatantly, aggressively false about the latter, whereas the former seems plausible, even though I basically flipped the result of a study my group just published.

But a new study, appearing in PLOS One, doesn’t seem to get that distinction as they try to examine how good people are at detecting fake coronavirus stories. The big headline? That healthcare providers are really no better at picking out fake Coronavirus stories from real ones.

False coronavirus news is a legitimate public health concern, with some notably tragic deaths like this man who died from taking chloroquine from his fish tank cleaner, or…