Story highlights
Players of the game are guided through a series of scenarios that health workers at hospitals and long-term care facilities encounter on a daily basis
A computer game called Escape COVID-19 is helping health workers not only get a distraction but also garner knowledge to battle about the novel coronavirus in real life.
Players of the game are guided through a series of scenarios that health workers at hospitals and long-term care facilities encounter on a daily basis.
Each challenge, from before leaving the house to their commute and especially on the job, is geared towards helping frontline staff change their real-world behaviour to better protect against spreading the virus.
COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs increased among conservative and social media users, Penn study finds
In the new study, researchers found that a continued use of conservative media sources which included Fox News, Breitbart and The Rush Limbaugh Show resulted in increased COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, which were associated with less mask-wearing and more vaccine hesitancy.
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Bethany Ao / The Philadelphia Inquirer | 2:24 pm, May 7, 2021 ×
In this file photo, demonstrators block the street during an Operation Gridlock protest outside of the New York State Capitol Building on April 22, 2020, in Albany, N.Y. Stefani Reynolds / Getty Images / TNS
(Tribune News Service) People who were heavy users of conservative or social media during the early months of the pandemic experienced increased belief in conspiracies surrounding COVID-19, a new study from researchers with the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found.
Executive summary
Media Matters reviewed our internal archive of cable news segments airing weekdays from 6 a.m. through midnight for any statements that undermined coronavirus science on Fox News. We broadly categorized the network’s coronavirus science misinformation into six different angles of attack: politicizing health measures, dismissing health measures, unfairly criticizing health officials, undermining COVID-19 vaccines, misrepresenting basic coronavirus facts, and dismissing or politicizing coronavirus data. We counted each angle once per segment. Segments could and often did include more than one angle.
From January 25 through April 23, 2021, Fox News personalities and guests misinformed viewers about the science of the coronavirus in at least 325 segments.
Conspiracies beliefs about COVID-19 increased among users of conservative and social media
Belief in conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic increased through the early months of the U.S. outbreak among people who reported being heavy users of conservative and social media, a study by Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) researchers has found.
Prior APPC research found that people who regularly used conservative or social media during the early months of the pandemic were more likely to report believing in a group of COVID-19 conspiracies. The current study expands on that, finding that a reliance on conservative or social media actually predicted an increase in conspiracy beliefs from March to July 2020.