Image source
EPA
As scientists race to fight and contain the Corona virus, others continue to spread misinformation about the deadly virus over the Internet.
Here we show a redeployed map despite it being ten years old, which illustrates the routes of airlines around the world, and news sites around the world have incorrectly used them to demonstrate the paths of the Corona virus outbreak.
News headlines such as: “A new map reveals that no country has escaped the clutches of Corona” and “a terrifying map reveals how the Corona virus passed through thousands of air travelers from the affected Chinese city of Wuhan to 400 cities around the world.”
Image source
Social Media
How did it start?
Earlier this month, researchers at the University of Southampton, published a search for places where people from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus appeared, two weeks before the quarantine imposed on the city.
The researchers returned to the data of the flights and mobile phones of Wuhan residents in previous years. The study estimated that about 60,000 people may have traveled to about 400 cities around the world before the authorities in Wuhan imposed a travel ban.
The researchers published a series of tweets about their work on Twitter, and among the researchers published a map showing the routes of airlines globally, without explaining that this map was not part of the study.
The map is filled with red lines, showing the routes of airlines around the world.
Some people interacted with the tweet, and some asked if the published map represented the results of the study? The research team replied in the negative, explaining that it is a link in a series of publications intended to show the extent of the global aviation network, and then the team deleted the tweet.
However, “somehow, this tweet created an incorrect story and quickly spread across the Internet,” Southampton University media office told the BBC.
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what happened after that?
The map appears to have been grabbed by some sites, and the initiative was from a number of Australian news websites. The map also appeared in the electronic versions of a number of British newspapers such as The Sun, Daily Mail and Metro.
The Australian television channel 7News used the map in a discussion paragraph, and posted a video of that paragraph, which in turn received more than seven million views.
Image source
Social Media
The report, released by the Australian channel, says the map talks about the spread of the virus around the world.
The announcer says that the red lines indicate five million residents fleeing the affected Wuhan city.
The fact of the matter is that the red lines represent flight routes around the world.
As for the number of five million, it came from a completely separate source. The mayor of Wuhan gave this number when talking about the total travelers from the city to spend the lunar New Year holiday, and most of them did not leave China.
What is the situation now?
Australian channel 7News has deleted the map from the report.
However, the same map is still present on many news sites that talk about the Corona virus, in many languages, including Arabic, Russian, Polish, and Vietnamese.
To cement the myth, a guest on the widespread Glen Beck talk show in the United States said that British researchers monitored the mobile phones of 60,000 people who left China, then provided a map of the paths taken by these fleeing Chinese.
The guest stressed that “the map is terrifying.”
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