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But with this new disease, scientists and public health authorities are learning in real time – and for over a year and a half, knowledge on key topics such as immunity and long-term covid is still evolving. Scientists are often looking for answers at the same time as the public, but this is not always clear to ordinary people, who can expect immediate and reliable information.

“One of the things [public health authorities] not necessarily doing what we need to move forward is actually about uncertainty, ”says Rene DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

This lack of clarity – and sometimes conflict – in public health messages can infiltrate the press and create a vacuum in which false or unverified information can accumulate and spread, DiResta says.

“Anyone with an opinion can fill this void,” she adds.

All of these conflicting messages, combined with the reality of slow scientific charts, can heighten mistrust. Rather than seeing changes in official guidelines as signs that health authorities are responding responsibly to new data, it is easy for the public to believe that these bodies and the media were wrong again – for example, when the CDC changed its mask guidelines. Politically motivated actors exploit this distrust. Sloppy headlines and misleading tweets either by reputable news outlets or by the predictions of journalists that they are aging poorly can be turned into “caught” memes that hyper-party influencers use to continue to undermine the credibility of the media.

“Organizations like Newsmax will take every opportunity to find a misreported or altered fact from a CNN broadcast,” DiResta says.

Public health officials (and reporters covering what they say and do) need a better system for communicating what we don’t already know and explaining that recommendations might change based on new information. DiResta advocates a Wikipedia-like approach to public health, where the evolution of scientific knowledge and debate are open and transparent, and a wide range of experts can contribute to what they know. “We will never go back to the old way, where they make a decision in some back room and present a single consensus to a gullible public,” she says. “This model is over.”

We are already seeing social media discussions between researchers, public health experts and doctors. Erica Chek Hayden, science journalist and director of the science communications program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says journalists should be mindful of the need to exercise due diligence in expanding access to scientific discussion.

“It can be informative from the point of view of a journalist, if you understand [how experts] find out what’s going on, ”she says. “What’s useless is that you cling to it at every moment and portray it as a kind of conclusion.”

This is good advice for the average reader too.

Focus on what is most useful

So how do you find reliable news that seems important to your life? One option is to keep an eye out for sources, especially local ones, that don’t focus solely on detailed lighting. Reporting that contextualizes the daily numbers you see is probably more useful than an endless series of stories that just ditch the top data.

South Side Weekly, a Chicago-based nonprofit newspaper, offers a model for something different. The weekly covers the south side of Chicago, most of the non-white areas. The newspaper, which was mainly staffed by volunteers, published ChiVaxBot, an automated Twitter account that displays two maps daily: COVID-19 vaccination rates by zip code and COVID-19 death rates by zip code. Rather than showing a snapshot of one day’s data, the daily updates showed a pattern over time. Because of this consistent and slow tracking, the bot sounded the alarm about imbalances in vaccines: Blacks and Hispanic regions had high deaths, but low vaccination rates, and this situation continues to this day.