Misinformation making a disease outbreak worse: Outcomes compared for influenza, monkeypox and norovirus

Health misinformation can exacerbate infectious disease outbreaks. Especially pernicious advice could be classified as “fake news”: manufactured with no respect for accuracy and often integrated with emotive or conspiracy-framed narratives. We built an agent-based model that simulated separate but linked circulating contagious disease and sharing of health advice (classified as useful or harmful). Such advice has potential to influence human risk-taking behavior and therefore the risk of acquiring infection, especially as people are more likely in observed social networks to share bad advice. We test strategies proposed in the recent literature for countering misinformation. Reducing harmful advice from 50% to 40% of circulating information, or making at least 20% of the population unable to share or believe harmful advice, mitigated the influence of bad advice in the disease outbreak outcomes. How feasible it is to try to make people “immune” to misinformation or control spread of harmful advice should be explored

An agent-based model about the effects of fake news on a norovirus outbreak

Background; Concern about health misinformation is longstanding, especially on the Internet. Methods; Using agent-based models, we considered the effects of such misinformation on a norovirus outbreak, and some methods for countering the possible impacts of “good” and “bad” health advice. The work explicitly models spread of physical disease and information (both online and offline) as two separate but interacting processes. The models have multiple stochastic elements; repeat model runs were made to identify parameter values that most consistently produced the desired target baseline scenario. Next, parameters were found that most consistently led to a scenario when outbreak severity was clearly made worse by circulating poor quality disease prevention advice. Strategies to counter “fake” health news were tested. Results; Reducing bad advice to 30% of total information or making at least 30% of people fully resistant to believing in and sharing bad health advice were effective thresholds to counteract the negative impacts of bad advice during a norovirus outbreak. Conclusion: How feasible it is to achieve these targets within communication networks (online and offline) should be explored