The pandemic is keeping many of us at home — anxious and online. It’s fertile ground for the spread of misleading information about COVID-19.
The ABC has been flooded with audience questions about whether certain blood types make you more susceptible to the virus, whether to avoid ibuprofen, and whether hydroxychloroquine could provide a cure.
All three notions have emerged from a flurry of research papers being published about the pandemic — but it’s research with serious limitations or that has been misinterpreted when seized upon on Facebook and Twitter and in the media.
“This story keeps changing not just every day, but probably every minute, every hour,” said Ivan Oransky, who teaches medical journalism at New York University and cofounded Retraction Watch.
“We have to treat all claims and all findings as provisional for a good long time.”
Let’s break down these three questions about the COVID-19 outbreak and explore where they came from.
Does your blood type affect your risk of COVID-19?
Concerns about people with blood group A being at higher risk of catching COVID-19 appear to have emerged largely from a Chinese study.
The paper is what’s known as a preprint: a draft based on early medical research shared publicly before it has been peer reviewed.
The researchers looked at the blood type distribution of around 2,000 patients with COVID-19 from three hospitals in Wuhan and Shenzhen, compared to those without it.
They found blood group A was associated with a higher risk of acquiring COVID-19 compared with non-A blood groups, but it’s got serious limitations.
It’s a very small study. And they had incomplete information about any chronic conditions the patients had, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, which could affect the results.
Nevertheless, this study was quickly shared in the media, often without independent commentary from other doctors who could point out these issues.
Darren Saunders, a cancer biologist at the University of New South Wales, said there was no biological reason that he could think of that suggested blood type had a role to play in this disease.
“I think that’s probably a statistical blip,” Dr Saunders said.
“It’s an interesting thing to look at but there’s so many other potential explanations for that data.”
Part of the explanation for the correlation might be that, while O is the most common blood group among Caucasians, A and AB groups are more common in some Asian populations, said Kirsty Short, a virologist at the University of Queensland.
Verdict: It’s unlikely that blood type plays a part in your risk of getting COVID-19.
Does ibuprofen worsen symptoms for those with COVID-19?
The novel coronavirus is just that — new — which means we’re still learning about which treatments work and which do not.
Take ibuprofen, for example. Fears that the drug, a very common pain killer, could worsen outcomes for those with the disease spread online throughout March.
The idea appears to have begun in France, where the country’s health minister tweeted that ibuprofen “could be a factor in worsening the infection”.
The lack of clarity has allowed misinformation to spread, including fake messages shared widely on Facebook and via text message, one of which claims “my friend who is a nurse at VGH (Vancouver)” said that Advil makes the virus “10x” worse”. Advil is a form of ibuprofen.
A spokesperson for Vancouver Coastal Health, which runs Vancouver General Hospital (VGH), told the ABC the hospital had not issued advice to that effect.
Dr Saunders said there was an ongoing discussion among experts on whether anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen, somehow hinders the body’s response to infection.
But it’s a theoretical discussion, and Dr Short said there was no clear experimental data showing it plays a role in COVID-19.
Dr Short pointed out that for managing fever — a common symptom of COVID-19 — paracetamol is better anyway.
But for those who are on anti-inflammatory medicines, talk to your doctor before changing your medications.
“It’s very hard to envisage that the risk of getting coronavirus would outweigh the risk of not taking some of these really important medications for, say, hypertension or auto-immune conditions,” she said.
Verdict: There’s currently no proof ibuprofen makes COVID-19 worse. Don’t change your medications without talking to your doctor.
Could hydroxychloroquine fix COVID-19?
In the midst of a pandemic, the idea of a miracle cure is a great temptation.
This month, it is hydroxychloroquine — an anti-malarial drug thrown into the spotlight by Donald Trump when he tweeted that along with another drug, it could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” and pointed to a study in the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
The small, preliminary study that caught Mr Trump’s attention has a significant 44,000 interactions on Facebook to date, per CrowdTangle. Another paper in the same journal about “peripheral venous catheters” has only eight.
Retraction Watch’s Mr Oransky said access to scientific research is a good thing, but we must understand we’re potentially only looking at a small piece of the answer to a problem.
“It’s like looking at a painting,” he said.
“You need to know whether you’re looking at the entire painting, or what you’re actually looking at is [a] one centimetre by one centimetre detail.”
Nevertheless, the power of President Trump’s attention all but ensured the drugs would be incorrectly heralded as a “cure” online.
This week, Facebook removed a video shared by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in which he claimed hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for COVID-19.
Here in Australia, failed political candidate and mining baron Clive Palmer paid for Facebook ads promoting his proposal to buy “1 million doses” of the drug to fight the pandemic.
“I don’t want our people to miss out on the treatment,” Mr Palmer said in a statement.
This hype can be damaging in very real ways, such as the death of a man and hospitalisation of his wife after taking a fish tank cleaning chemical which contained another form of chloroquine as an ingredient.
The couple had ingested the additive thinking it would protect them against COVID-19.
There have been some experiments that indicate that hydroxychloroquine could be effective in treating COVID-19.
But these were very small and weren’t controlled or randomised in the ways that help researchers determine how much weight to place on the outcome.
And, Dr Short said, even among these studies that indicated the drug had promise, participants in the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents study still ended up being admitted to intensive care and even dying.
“What we really need is a big, large-scale clinical trial that’s properly controlled to determine whether this is going to be effective or not,” she said.
The WHO has recently announced just this: a large-scale trial of several existing drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, which should clarify these questions.
Verdict: Evidence for hydroxychloroquine and similar anti-malarial drugs is mixed and based on loosely controlled studies. Even studies indicating its promise don’t show it’s a miracle cure. A large study by the WHO should have more reliable results in the coming months.
The answer: science takes time
The ponderous, incremental process of science does not sit easily in the social media world where we want answers in seconds.
The public needs to be cautious, and so do scientists.
“Medical researchers are going to have to be careful about the public pronouncements they make,” said Deborah Lupton, a health sociologist at the University of New South Wales. “You don’t want to raise false hopes.”
Given the immense volume of research being undertaking on the pandemic, Mr Oransky said he’d be unsurprised if there was a new miscommunication or misunderstood claim every day.
We need to avoid treating any one study “as gospel”.
“I would love it if the next study I read showed a cure for this thing,” he said.
“But I know full well that’s just not going to be the case.”
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