DOH warns vs fake public health news

NOT LIKE BEFORE File photo shows a COVID-19 ward at the Philippine General Hospital in 2021. —Inquirer file photo

MANILA, Philippines — Disinformation and misinformation campaigns about COVID-19 have remained rampant more than a year after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the end of the pandemic-causing disease as a global health emergency.

The Department of Health (DOH) has warned the public against circulating false claims indicating that Singapore discovered that COVID-19 does not exist as a virus, but a bacterium that has been exposed to radiation and causes human death by coagulation in the blood.

READ: COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus, not by bacterium – DOH

“The Singapore Ministry of Health clarified that this information did not originate from them and referenced similar misleading claims that have appeared in other countries,” the DOH said in a statement.

“Furthermore, the department emphasizes that COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, not by a bacterium,” it added.

Beware of wrong data

The agency advised the public to remain vigilant against misleading COVID-19 information and to seek updates only from legitimate sources and platforms.

According to the Facebook posts—which first appeared in July 2021, but have been circulating again in the past two months—share a claim attributed to Singapore’s Ministry of Health saying that the city-state conducted the first COVID-19 autopsy and discovered the disease is caused by a bacterium, not a virus.

This is false as the first COVID-19 autopsy was conducted on an 85-year-old Chinese man in January 2020, according to the examination report published by China’s Journal of Forensic Medicine in February 2020.

Medical experts and global health bodies, including the WHO, have maintained that COVID-19 is caused by a virus, not a bacterium.

While antibiotics do not cure the disease, patients may still be given these medications to prevent bacterial co-infection.

Ask a professional

“Using antibiotics to treat COVID-19 will not help, because it’s a virus and not a bacteria. But what we have seen in some hospitalized patients is that they were given antibiotics, not to treat COVID-19, but to prevent superinfection by other bacteria because some people are really fragile and we fear that on top of COVID-19, they can get also another bacterial infection,” said Dr. Sylvie Briand, WHO director of global infectious hazard preparedness.

In May 2023, the WHO declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. This does not mean that the pandemic itself was over, but only the global emergency it caused is—for now.

Since 2020, more than 776 million people have contracted COVID-19 across the world, with more than 7 million deaths.

The number of people who contracted the contagious disease, however, has been dwindling since mass vaccination efforts started on Dec. 8, 2020.

In the Philippines, the DOH has stopped publishing cumulative COVID-19 data since January this year, with the country’s number of cases stuck at 4.1 million, with 66,864 Filipinos who died from the disease.