Verifying Online Information About COVID-19 and the Elderly
When reading or searching for information online about COVID-19, we all want to be well-informed. However, people in the elderly community need to receive the right COVID-19 information. If you happen to fall within this age group or have a loved one who does, you might be wondering what you can do to separate the facts from fiction. Thankfully, there are ways you can go about doing this. In this guide, you will learn the best ways to verify coronavirus stories, especially those pertaining to the elderly population. You will also be given a shortlist of resources that have reputable information.
Engage in Thorough Research
Not every news story you see online is credible. So when verifying the legitimacy of these stories, you have to do some extra research. If you come across a COVID-19 article that sounds too good to be true, try asking yourself questions about the story's details. One good example could be a story about a new FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine being administered in doctors’ offices. Reread this news story. Do the details make sense or add up? Does this story sound credible? Research by inquiring with your doctor about this vaccine or search for more information online.
How to Parse Through Scary Information
You can improve your news verification process by going through alarming information with your elderly family member. During this pandemic, there have been plenty of news updates that may have given your family members a reason to worry. When going through information like this, it's important to remain calm until you get all of the facts.
One example of a scary-sounding story is about a specific racial elderly group having the highest COVID-19 death rate. This could be an alarming story if your elderly loved one is within that demographic. However, once you both calm down and do some fact-checking on this story, you will come to see the illegitimacy of it.
Don't Believe Everything You Read
Online news is great at keeping you well-informed about this serious virus. However, it's also important to be aware of faulty online news. In this present time, you can't quickly believe everything you hear about the virus. You should also be careful about where you're getting your information. If the source of your information has proven to be unreliable before, do you think it will do better next time? It might be best to discontinue using that source to get news about COVID-19 and the elderly.
Find More Reputable Sources
Once you stop using that unreliable source for COVID-19 news, it's time to find more reputable sources. While you have to be careful with online news today, there are a few resources that have proven to be trustworthy. Here are some of those online sources:
● Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 webpage: The CDC coronavirus page is reliable in providing accurate, fact-checked information about the virus. It even has a section where they give you the latest daily updates.
● Open-Access Data and Computational Resources to Address COVID-19: This website gives you resources provided by federal agencies (including the National Institutes of Health or NIH), public consortia, and private entities.
● National Institutes of Health's coronavirus webpage: The NIH website lets you subscribe to get the latest COVID-19 news. You could also search for clinical trials related to COVID-19 and the elderly.
These are just a few online sources that have proven to be reputable. A dependable news source will fact-check their information before publishing it online. If you and your elderly loved one do a little background research, parse through scary information, stop referring to unreliable websites, and utilize reputable sources instead, you will be successful in verifying information about COVID-19 and the elderly.
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