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But as this is a new disease, scientists and public health officials are learning in real time, and for more than a year and a half, knowledge on key issues like immunity and long-term covid is still evolving. Scientists often seek answers at the same time as the public, but this is not always obvious to ordinary people who can expect urgent and reliable information.

“One of the things [public health authorities] “Progress is actually communicating about uncertainty, not doing what we need to see,” says Renée DiResta, director of technical research at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

This lack of clarity—and sometimes conflict—in public health messages can leach into the press, creating a vacuum where misleading or unverified information can fester and spread, DiResta says.

“This void can be filled by anyone with an idea,” he adds.

All these contradictory messages, combined with the reality of slow scientific timelines, can exacerbate insecurity. Rather than viewing changes in the official guidance as signs that health officials are responding responsibly to new data, it is easy for the public to believe that those officials and the media were wrong again, for example, when the CDC changed mask guidelines. Politically motivated actors exploit this distrust. Sloppy headlines and misleading tweets can be turned into “getcha” memes, which extreme partisan influencers use to continue to undermine trust in the media, by reputable news outlets or the badly aging estimates of journalists.

“Organizations like Newsmax will seize every opportunity to find a fact that has been misreported or altered from a CNN broadcast,” DiResta says.

Public health officials (and reporters covering what officials say and do) need a better system to communicate what we don’t yet know and explain that guidance may change based on new information. DiResta argued Wikipedia-like approach to public health, where scientific knowledge and discussion is public and transparent, and where a wide range of experts can contribute what they know. “It will never go back to the old way, where they show some determination in the back room and deliver a unified consensus to a trusting public,” he says. “This model is finished.”

We’re already seeing this kind of scientific back and forth play on social media among researchers, public health professionals, and doctors. Science journalist and director of the science communications program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Erika Check Hayden, says journalists should remember to do their due diligence regarding this increased access to scientific deliberation.

“It can be informative from a journalist’s point of view, if you understand it, [how experts] “They’re investigating what’s going on.” “What’s useless is that at any given moment you get hung up on it and portray it as some kind of outcome.”

That’s good advice for the average reader, too.

Focus on the most useful

So, how can you find reliable news that makes you feel relevant to your life? One option is to pay particular attention to local resources, resources that don’t just focus on individual coverage. Reporting that contextualizes the daily numbers you see is probably more useful than an endless series of stories shaking up top-level data.

South Side WeeklyA Chicago-based nonprofit newspaper offers a model for something different. The Weekly covers Chicago’s South End, a predominantly non-white district. The largely voluntary newspaper, ChiVaxBot, an automated Twitter account that shares two maps side-by-side each day: covid-19 vaccination rates by zip code and covid-19 death rates by zip code. Instead of showing a snapshot of a day’s data, daily updates showed a pattern over time. Because of this consistent, slow monitoring, the bot has raised the alarm about vaccine differences: Black and Latino regions showed high deaths but low vaccination rates, a situation that continues to this day.