Quantity with Quality

Beneficial Irony in the Time of Pandemic

Finally, a Corona we can all love

This is my next in a series of articles responding to Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s challenge to produce a short quality article with three take home points each day for thirty days.

I have chosen to use Wikipedia’s main page as inspiration, choosing one topic from their “Did You Know” section as topical encouragement.

Corona Rintawan is an emergency medicine physician practicing in Indonesia since 2003, and in perhaps a bit of cosmic irony, the chief of the Indonesian emergency command center responding to the outbreak of the coronavirus disease.

Corona has been involved in multiple emergency aid responses including the 2004 tsunami in Sumatra, Indonesia; heading the medical response team to the Nepal earthquake in 2014 and coordinating medical practitioners’ involvement in the Rohingya refugee crisis in 2017.

Corona has used his standing in the medical community, as well as his opportune name association to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 outbreak. Corona has specifically called out concern about people using chloroquine as protection against Covid-19 as there is no evidence substantiating the efficacy of such self-medication and which may induce harmful side effects.

What We Can Learn from Corona

Corona is a skilled medical professional practicing emergency medicine and specializing in response to global emergencies.

The contrast of Corona’s name to current events provides us with a powerful lesson about prejudicial bias.

We are likely all familiar with the news articles that promulgated all over social media about Corona brand beer sales slumping as a result of the Covid-19 virus.

While the claims were patently false (link to Snopes fact-check article), it illustrates how willing people are to associate a negative bias towards an unrelated brand (or person, race, culture etc.) based on name association.

And while AB InBev (Corona beer’s parent company) isn’t likely seeing a significant slump in sales due exclusively to name association, any damage done by the spread of the story is a shameful indictment of how willing people are to pass on prejudicial information without verification.

Take home points:

• Prejudicial bias can be unusually resistant to reason or rational explanation and have an uncanny ability to reproduce
• Our first line of defense against prejudicial bias is to recognize when it occurs, and to check our facts before we pass any information or opinion on to others
• The final step for eliminating prejudicial bias is refusing to spread the misinformation.

What tolerance do you have for passing on things you hear, especially on social media? Do you blindly distribute, or do you employ some level of skepticism about the voracity of the information you receive; especially through social media?

What fact checking systems to you use to verify information? Are your information sources free from bias? Do you know how to find out?

I think we can all learn something from Corona, and work to eradicate misinformation together.

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Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.