Novel Coronavirus.  Wuhan Virus.  COVID-19.  Whatever you want to call it, the world is facing (another) deadly outbreak.  These things—outbreaks in general—are serious and require the timely collection and dissemination of accurate information in order to respond in anything like an effective and coordinated manner across multiple national and local governments.  And yet we as humans seem incapable, at times, of disciplining ourselves to report just the facts.

Let me step aside and use another example to make the point before coming back to this.  When I was in Afghanistan, working in a Joint Operations Center, you’d sometimes hear explosions off in the distance.  Whatever activity in the JOC comes to a screeching halt as everyone holds their breath waiting to see if more detonations follow.  As the seconds and minutes tick by in silence, however, people start moving again—slowly and quietly, at first—back to their seats, their computers, their phones.

Hushed calls go out to the Intel officer who just stepped out to get lunch, or the security liaison NCO who left to grab some coffee.  But by the time everyone looks around and agrees without speaking that this particular incident is over, the JOC is generally assembled and ready to receive, and then act upon, reporting from the incident.  It’s a beautiful thing to watch a well-trained and experienced operational team like this, and I choke up a bit at the memory, but that model of military efficiency was almost invariably overshadowed by what followed. 

If enough time passed without a solid report from an eye witness on the ground, a drone operator, or a helicopter pilot, inevitably a stream of reports would come in, one after another, from people who: 1) didn’t see the event; 2) hadn’t received any information from someone who saw the event; and 3) didn’t seem to mind passing information up through official channels—to an operations center trying to gauge the situation and prepare a potentially lethal response—with no basis whatsoever in truth.  This was, needless to say, unhelpful in the extreme and we came to call it “chasing the boom”.  For whatever reason, trained military personnel—who in theory know the reasons behind accurate military reporting and have been taught how to do it—felt the need to invent and/or perpetuate false information in a data vacuum.  Drove us nuts!

Why, for the love of all that is holy, would anyone make up a report when lives potentially hang in the balance?  When an effective response relies upon the quality and timeliness of that information? 

Part of it is, no doubt, the uber-connected nature of the modern battlefield.  A report that used to go up to an experienced NCO or officer who immediately asks “Did you see this?” or “Has this been verified?” before being forwarded to a command center, now comes straight into the JOC with no adult filter.  The phenomenon has bothered me ever since I left Kabul, and yet, isn’t that exactly what we’re seeing right now with COVID-19?

People, organizations, and even whole governments are reacting to rumor, inuendo, and pseudo-reporting in ways that are simply unhelpful.  This not only impedes effective response locally, but clouds the issue for those really smart people trying to figure out how to stop this thing globally.  The experts—those genius and near-genius microbiologists working in cool-looking, white-coated, air-filtered labs—for all their brilliance still require accurate information in order to understand the situation and make recommendations that might just matter to you, me, and everyone else in the path of this deadly and highly contagious bug.

So, if I can say just one thing, right now, to anybody wishing to come up on the net with COVID-19 related data, it’s this:  if you don’t know … just shut up!  Take it from me, you’re not helping the situation.  Stop passing rumors.  Stop embellishing facts.  Stop—if only for this month—seeking your ten seconds of fame on social media.  Let people who do know communicate without the white noise interference of conjecture and bad information.

Thank-you, please wash your hands … and not just this month!

M.G. Haynes