Backchat: Covering coronavirus

Host: Nick Howe

Hello, and welcome back to our roundtable discussion show Backchat, where we look at the stories behind the stories here at Nature. On this edition of the show, we’re going to do a deep dive into the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that originated in China. We’ll be talking about how we report on such a fast-moving story, and with the deluge of news about this story out there, where does Nature fit in? I’m Nick Howe, and joining me in the studio are Ewen Callaway…

Ewen Callaway

Hi there, I’m a senior reporter at Nature in London specialising in the life sciences.

Host: Nick Howe

Nisha Gaind…

Nisha Gaind

Hi, I’m Nature’s European Bureau Chief, also in London.

Host: Nick Howe

And on the phone line from Japan, I’m joined by David Cyranoski.

David Cyranoski

Hello, I’m Nature’s Asia-Pacific correspondent.

Host: Nick Howe

David, you’ve been reporting on this since day one. How has this story evolved, and did you have any inkling of how big this might become?

David Cyranoski

No, I really didn’t at the beginning. When it first came out, it was the early days of January when I heard about it, and at that time, they were just calling it a mysterious pneumonia, which doesn’t sound that scary. But then I think around 7 January they identified it as a coronavirus, which then became very scary because then it reminded everyone of SARS in 2003 which spread around the world and killed a lot of people.

Host: Nick Howe

And China’s obviously been where there’s been the most cases. Do you have a sense of what the atmosphere is like there now with the lockdowns and everything for the people affected?

David Cyranoski

In Wuhan, they still have about a 2.3% fatality rate, I think was the last figure that I saw, so anybody that thinks they might have it is going to be very scared, I think, because the hospitals have been overwhelmed. If you go to the hospital, if you didn’t have it, you might get it in a hospital and medical staff have been infected as well, so some of the medical staff is probably taking time off and a couple of prominent doctors have died themselves, so I think at the very centre, it’s still quite a scary event. For a lot of people that aren’t showing symptoms of this, it’s wearing them down because they are having trouble getting food. I was emailing with a researcher today who said she had to try to get food for not only herself but for other people in compounds that she knew that had been locked down and they couldn’t get out, so she was trying to collect food for other people in the community while she was also taking care of kids and trying to get some research done, so it’s hard to live a normal life.

Nisha Gaind

And so, David, I think you have experience of reporting the first SARS outbreak. How does reporting this outbreak compare?

David Cyranoski

I think in both cases there was a lot of confusion about what was happening, and with this one, it feels like the first SARS but very much sped up. I think both the governments’ reporting on it, they give daily comprehensive updates about how many cases there are and the quarantines and all of that, they’ve been very, very proactive about it in a way that they weren’t in the first. I feel like everything has accelerated, and I also think it’s starting to show that it might peter out more quickly than the first SARS did which, like I said, went on for months and months.

Host: Nick Howe

So, what are some of the sensitivities involved in reporting on this virus? For example, the WHO chose to avoid calling the disease by its place of origin. What’s Nature’s stance on this?

Ewen Callaway

The name of the disease and the name of the virus, I guess, has been a bit of an issue. A lot of news organisations, including Nature, originally would describe this as a ‘China coronavirus’ or something like that, which, on reflection, is quite insensitive. This virus is in, you said, 30 countries and you don’t want it to forever be linked with one country in which it originated. And then there’s this whole thing of what to call this. A team of virologists has come up with the name for the virus, SARS-CoV-2, based on its phylogeny. WHO has called the disease it causes COVID-19 based on their best practices and guidelines, and the WHO apparently doesn’t want to use SARS-CoV-2 for reasons unknown. So, yeah, I guess there’s a lot to tiptoe around, basically.

David Cyranoski

I think the WHO didn’t want that partly because there was some pushback from China because at that time, China didn’t want this to be considered as extreme as the SARS 1. They didn’t want people to have them together in their minds as though this is as bad as SARS. But now, I think a lot of people probably consider this worse than SARS, so maybe that resistance has died down.

Host: Nick Howe

So, Nisha, with everyone from the BBC to CNN covering this story, there’s no shortage of information about the coronavirus out there. Where does Nature fit into this? What can we add to the sea of news?

Nisha Gaind

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean it’s a huge global story and it’s one that has been really, really fast-moving, like you said, and for us, it’s a massive story for our audience who are mostly scientists and not only do they want to read about it, these people are central to doing a lot of the work that is involved in trying to control the spread of this virus. And so, our focus has really been on looking at the science that is being done, the questions that researchers are trying to answer in a really rapid way in response to this escalating outbreak, and yeah, we’re really lucky to have really experienced reporters like David and Ewen who have covered infectious disease and outbreaks like this over the decades.

Host: Nick Howe

And we did something this time that we don’t typically do, which we have a live blog live on the nature.com/news site. What was the decision to make that?

Nisha Gaind

A lot of the answer is to do with how fast-moving this story is. We heard from David how quickly it started at the beginning, and we’re a relatively small team compared to a lot of media outlets. We, at the moment, have about three reporters on this, which is quite a large proportion of our reporting corps, and we chose to make this live updates page just so that we could really disseminate some of the more incremental news in a really rapid way. So, of course, there are stories that reporters are chasing and reporting out as big normal stories that we publish as normal, but there are also these kind of things that happen hourly or daily that we want to tell our readers. It might be a spike in deaths or a spike in infections or new pieces of research that give us clues about where this virus came from, and these are things that we just want to get out there really quickly, and that’s why this constantly updated page ended up being a really good way to do that.

Host: Nick Howe

With this being such a fast-moving story, how do you actually report on it?

Ewen Callaway

I remember writing one story and it became outdated basically within half a day or something like that. Different facts became outdated and I had to go through several different versions. This was still when it was unclear of the extent of human-to-human transmission versus animal-to-human spill over. Yeah, so it was a bit tricky and I had to rewrite a story for print pretty much completely from the one that had been online two days prior or something like that. But yeah, I guess you just do the best you can to update it. I think right now, things have settled down a bit and the stories we’re pursuing are much slower moving, at least that’s my sense of things, and so you have time do checks and things, not that we’re not doing those. But yeah, I think it was a challenge at the beginning but now I think it’s slowed down a little bit, at least for our coverage.

David Cyranoski

Yeah, no, I had the exact same experience. In fact, one of the stories I was working on was about modellers who tried to say when the number of new cases was going to peak, and as I was writing the story, a new model would come out every day or every two days, so you’d have to try and take that new model into account, and they’d say different things, and at first, people were saying it was going to be the end of March or the end of May even, and then we started to get people saying well, no it’s actually going to be the end of February. So, you had these kind of two competing theories and then you start to have people say, well, actually, it’s already happened. The peak kind of had passed over me as I was going, if those models are right, but it was very much a difficult task to try to keep all of that in mind as a moving target.

Host: Nick Howe

And if it is like that and some people are saying one thing and some people are saying another and it’s moving so quickly, how do you go about fact checking something like this?

Ewen Callaway

I think the way you fact check any other story is check once, check twice, and make sure the information you have is as accurate as possible. You’re only doing the best we can under certain constraints. I don’t think we certainly haven’t lowered our standards for fact checking during this outbreak. Some news organisations have or maybe they have lower standards, but no, I think you just do your damn best. I don’t really have any other answer than that.

Nisha Gaind

I think that also, like I said, we’re really lucky to have experienced reporters who are talking to geneticists and people who do genomics and people who deal with infectious diseases all the time anyway for their job, so I think we’re lucky in that we have reporters who know these beats really well, and they haven’t been moved from a political desk or something. This is really their bread and butter, so we’re already in touch with a lot of the teams that are doing this work and then to some extent it’s up to us to decide whether these pieces of research that have been done really quickly are worthy of our coverage because we know we’re a kind of credibility machine so we have a big responsibility.

Host: Nick Howe

And in terms of when you were doing this, how much time is spent debunking as opposed to reporting on it?

Ewen Callaway

At Nature, we haven’t really done much debunking. I mean David and I did a story kind of taking aim at this theory that snakes were an intermediate host of the virus that transmitted it to humans based on a pretty shoddy paper that virologists who had a clue denounced. But yeah, I think we’re trying to have a pretty good BS meter and only present things that we think are important to our readers and important to the scientific community.

David Cyranoski

There was a story that I wrote a couple of years ago in Wuhan about BSL-4 labs, so biosafety labs, and they were going to look at the SARS virus and other coronaviruses, and people focused on that to fuel a lot of conspiracy theories that this was some kind of weapon, and people would get online and attach my story which referred to it as a biosafety laboratory and call it a bioweapons laboratory. And then I had a lot of people writing me to say why aren’t you reporting about how China is trying to destroy the world with this virus, and we kind of just, I think we put a little qualifier on the story to say that basically we had no evidence to believe that.

Host: Nick Howe

So, as you say, we added a little like editorial line to that. Is that something that we typically do?

Nisha Gaind

That’s actually a pretty rare move, I would say. The stories that have been published in the past, they exist in a particular time frame, so it is pretty unusual that you would go back and add editorial notes to stories. But in this case, we noticed from analytics and from what David was telling us and from other sources that this story was getting a huge amount of attention, essentially fuelling what we deemed conspiracy theories online, so it felt like the right time after the appropriate editorial discussion to put something out there with Nature’s name on it to say that we didn’t think that there was evidence to support those theories.

Host: Nick Howe

And in sort of the wider coverage, there is a lot of misinformation out there about this disease. Does Nature have a role in trying to combat that misinformation?

Nisha Gaind

I think that’s something that Ewen has already touched on because there are stories out there that other outlets have done that have purely been designed to just debunk some of the misinformation out there, which is a thing that bubbles up during outbreaks like these because fear suddenly becomes a currency and so does misinformation. We haven’t necessarily chosen to focus on that because, frankly, we’re trying to spread not-misinformation. We’re trying to spread accurate information.

Host: Nick Howe

And that’s something I wanted to touch on there when you say about fear, with a story like this, sort of a global disease spread, is there a risk of worrying people simply by reporting on it?

David Cyranoski

I think so, yeah. So, this modelling story that I was doing, there was a guy who, his model said that 40% of China is going to be infected and that there’s going to be 2.3 million people infected in one day, and if you keep a fatality rate of what we’re looking at now of 2.3% in Wuhan or close to 1%, that’s going to be a lot of people dying and a lot of suffering, so that’s what his model said. He checks out as a researcher but what I tried very hard to do is to put that all in perspective and say, well, if that is going to be the case, we would expect many fewer of those people to be severely affected. There wouldn’t be as much suffering as we’re seeing right now with the limited number of cases. So, you try to put it in the best context to make sure that people get a full picture of it and hopefully that will make people panic to just the right level.

Ewen Callaway

Yeah, I mean this thing is scary, like, let’s call a spade a spade. It’s just because a lot of the unknowns, basically. We don’t have any therapeutics, we don’t have a vaccine, we have no pre-existing immunity, which we do for most flus that emerge. So, there’s every possibility that this could cause a pandemic and become established in humans and cause great suffering and very legitimate scientists are saying that, so I think that’s something that we need to convey to readers as well.

Host: Nick Howe

Yeah, and with that and with these different model estimates and things out there, should we make it super clear how much we don’t know about this disease?

Nisha Gaind

Yeah, and I think that’s a lot of what the reporting has done so far in the early days. A lot of the stories that we’re writing, we’re simply outlining the questions that researchers themselves were trying to answer. I think that was one of the first stories that David and Ewen were working on because there was kind of a lag between this outbreak really picking up and these first kind of research papers and analyses coming out. That definitely comes across in our coverage, and then as the, I think now, I guess it’s weeks that have passed, those answers have started to trickle in and we get a slightly better picture but again, a lot of these analyses are preliminary and it’s the comment and the context that we provide when we report those results that is really important for us and for our readers.

Ewen Callaway

One thing that is interesting is the pace of research on this disease and this virus is pretty astonishing. A lot of it is ending up on preprint servers and there’s a lot of chaff, I guess, but there’s a lot of wheat there. There’s a lot of really good science that’s coming out very rapidly, and we’re really quickly learning a lot about this disease and about this virus, which I think is kind of astounding. Whether it does anything to bend the curve of this epidemic in time remains a question, but scientists are jumping into action and producing some really outstanding research, especially scientists in China. Yeah, I think we’re seeing some really impressive work under quite hectic conditions, I guess.

Host: Nick Howe

Well, there we have it for another edition of Backchat. All that remains today is to thank my guests, Ewen Callaway, David Cyranoski and Nisha Gaind, for joining me today. You can find all the stories that we discussed here over at nature.com/news. This has been Backchat. I’ve been Nick Howe. Thanks for listening.