Jonas Voss

There's a lot of misinformation about the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak being shared in the silos of messaging apps. This means it's harder to search for them in an attempt to verify their validity. People who share them aren't doing it to cause harm, quite the opposite, they are sharing them because they believe it will help their friends and loved ones.

Various claims about drinking hot water, gargling with a hot water saline solution, and going into the sun are all things that hasn't proven to do anything in terms of avoiding getting the virus, or alleviating it if you are already infected.

If your friends or family share these things with you on chats or email, please tell them that none of these things are proven to work, and that the consequences of following the advice from these copy/paste jobs vary from mostly harmless (drink hot drinks), to potentially harmful to you or others (if you have a runny nose, then you don't have coronavirus).

There's a few things you can do to respond in a way that can help convince them these statements are not true, and that they should stop sharing them as if they are. One of them is pointing them to one of the many sites that are debunking the claims with supported material and science:

• Fullfact.org is a UK charity that figths misinformation online, and they have an excellent section debunking various coronavirus claims
• Snopes has an extensive section on the various claims on origins and treaments of COVID-19
• WHO has a section on busting COVID-19 myths which is highly recommended
• WIRED magazine has a good article on how to curb the spread of the rumors

Stay safe, stay home and help stop the rumors and the outbreak from spreading.

#coronavirus #covid19

Water at airports has been around since 2017, according to wayback machine. The purpose is, in the words of its creator:

I created this website because not only am I fed up with paying high prices for drinking water in airport departure lounges, but we all need to cut down on the amount of one use plastics we are throwing away into the environment.

Users, as well as the owner, contributes their own findings. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the forum to keep a note of the updates for the different airports.

For the last couple of years I've been travelling with a water bottle to avoid using more plastic than necessary when travelling, and this site has been helpful in finding where to fill it in the departure lounges I've visited.