Public health Dr here. If you have epidemiologist in your bio, or if you were "involved with Ebola," whatever that means, can you stop tweeting about coronavirus in all caps with alarm bell emojis?
Cuz if you know anything about public health you know inciting panic is unhelpful
Cuz if you know anything about public health you know inciting panic is unhelpful
And your tweets about R0s and exponential growth - tweets based on preliminary data with assumptions for still many unknown - are literally being RTd by ppl saying "omg I'm so scared now."
Don't do that to people. Inciting panic is irresponsible and bad for public health.
Don't do that to people. Inciting panic is irresponsible and bad for public health.
Grown ass men with "epidemiologist" in their Twitter bios invoking god in all caps is not what we need during an outbreak of a novel infection.
And because I'm a brown woman and need to state my credentials, I'm an epidemiologist, fmr officer in the US Epidemic Intelligence Service, and covered outbreaks from the other side as a newspaper reporter. From every vantage point I can tell you that stoking fear is dangerous.
I reported on the errors made in epidemic predictions during the Ebola outbreak. It's political, too. Scientists said say they sometimes publish worst case scenarios to get politicians to sit up and pay attention.
scientificamerican.com/article/ebola-…
scientificamerican.com/article/ebola-…
