Rumourmongers are worse that coronavirus

When Spanish flu struck the world, some people blamed the discovery of radio waves as the cause. A section said 3G was responsible for SARC outbreak.

When it was time for 4G, people were just waiting to attribute it as the cause for something else and we saw Swine flu coming in handy for those to blame. Now is the time for 5G and we blame it for the coronavirus.

Man is more foolish than intelligent, and genius has a short life unlike stupidity in the world. What else to say? People on social media are blaming 5G for causing the pandemic that has already afflicted over 1.7 million people and killed over 1,00,000 people.

That is 5G, the technology that is supposed to make mobile and internet communications much, much faster. Once it is implemented across the world, fake news will travel even faster.

Our technology is also strange. As much as it helps us move about with ease, it also arrests the growth of our thinking faculties to that an extent. No one asks, in the first place, how could telecom possibly be related to the spread of a respiratory virus?

Then there is the other extreme who simply dismiss the existence of the virus itself. For them, it is the radiation from 5G what is actually causing Covid-19 symptoms. Another variation of the conspiracy theory asserts that radiation from 5G can weaken your immune system to the point that you are more easily infected by the Covid-19 coronavirus.

So the claim is that the advent of 5G is what has allowed this virus to spread as it has. Does this then mean that all those patients, doctors, nurses, other healthcare professionals, scientists, public health officials, journalists, policy makers, school officials, businesses, and countless others are on the hoax, coordinating this massive scam?

That would be amazing. Just getting politicians and scientists to agree on something can be the greatest global achievement of this millennium. Of course, such claims come with evidence. Something happened and then something else happened. Therefore, they must be linked.

5G can produce some kind of radiation. The claims may have originated with comments made by a doctor in Belgium, who said he believed 5G was "life-threatening" and connected to the coronavirus, while noting that he had not done a fact-check. When nothing is sure, anything is possible.

While there is scientific consensus around the basic medical realities of Covid-19, researchers are still filling in the gaps on a virus that no one knew existed four months ago.

That relatively dearth of information opens the way for ideas usually relegated to the internet's fringes to slip into the broader conversation about the pandemic — a dangerous feature of an unprecedented global health crisis.

The mainstream is unusually accepting of conspiratorial thinking, rumours, alarm, or panic during uncertain times — a phenomenon that explains the movement of misinformation that we are seeing now. One could certainly blame China or the WHO for the spread of the virus.

But, to attribute the very existence of the same to 5G is listless thinking. Let us be wary of the false narratives. The first question that should come to mind is "is this true"?

Let us not blindly forward everything and anything. Let us be assured, man is the dumbest animal!