Assignment #8: Misinformation & Fact-Checking

        It seems like any assignment that I have had over the last year there’s some way that I can tie to COVID-19 in one way or another. Covid-19 has consumed and transformed our lives for more than a year now. Our initial introduction to this pandemic was chaotic in and of itself and not just to the United States but to two people all around the world. To have a virus spreading as rapidly as COVID-19 was in its initial stages without tons of factual and viable information was troublesome within itself. It was the perfect storm for misinformation and “fake news” to run rampant. We went from seeing people buying out toilet paper in the supermarket to two people wearing gloves and an attempt to be safer all while touching everything in sight that’s making the gloves pointless. Not just that at the beginning of the pandemic the previous president of the United States Donald Trump chose to refer to the Covid-19 pandemic as the Chinese virus. Back in early March 2020, there was a lack of clear information because it was an ever-growing situation that had so many moving parts hence it being the perfect storm for tons of miscommunication. One of the first examples of business information that comes to my mind is having the president of the United States of America refer to the Covid-19 pandemic as the Chinese virus publicly without enough information to explain the statement.

        Although it is now public knowledge that COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China back in December 2019, at the time that Donald Trump was making his controversial statements he was not making everyday Americans privy to all of the information that he was getting to make such reckless statements. Not to mention with the state of the country at the time, to call this serious pandemic the Chinese virus made divisions among people harder. As sad as it is to say, racism, colorism, sexism, etc still exist and despite the changing times, the last thing that the country needed was further division at the hands of the country's leader. The hashtag #ChineseVirus was trending on Twitter for weeks. To see things like this in the media is why it is so important for people to fact-check everything. When it comes to the most reliable information in reference Covid-19 and even currently comes from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention at www.cdc.gov. Although there has been some information that they have released that they soon after had to change, but the pandemic has been ever-changing so the information has been as well.