A few UCSF doctors have become social media stars of sorts.
Word that the Bay Area may be flattening the coronavirus curve swept across the nation this week thanks in part to a few UCSF physicians who’ve become social media stars of sorts, taking to Twitter to help educate the public about the frightening and evolving outbreak while adding commentary and a little levity along the way.
Since March 16, Bob Wachter, head of the school’s Department of Medicine, has posted daily updates — the Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, he calls them — in which he cites daily numbers at UCSF, often accompanied by charts and observations.
The numbers have shown only “a slight upward tilt,” he noted on Thursday. “In chatting with other hospitals in SF, everybody’s seeing relatively low numbers.”
Then he posted a photo of his comfortfood lunch: a can of SpaghettiO’s with meatballs and a couple of Double Stuf Oreos. “Sorry ... it just felt right,” Wachter tweeted.
Typically, doctors have remained more taciturn during public health crises. Research and medical observations were usually confined to medical journals and the occasional news story and opinions limited to hallway conversations. But with the public thirsty for information on the coronavirus, doctors across the country have taken to social media — Twitter, in particular — to snuff out misinformation, tamp down rumors and spread science about the coronavirus outbreaks.
Unlike many hospitals, UCSF decided early on it was going to be transparent about the numbers of cases, Wachter said. He reports them daily in his Covid Chronicles, which are a series of tweets he describes as “a way of culling a firehose of information,” so the public gets data it can believe.
Jahan Fahimi, an emergency physician at UCSF, is also among the Bay Area doctors tweeting to increase awareness about the virus and prevention efforts — from how San Francisco appears to be flattening the curve to UCSF’s requirement that everyone who enters a medical building must don a mask. These doctors are also sharing clinical observations in public posts and through Twitter direct messages.
“We’ve been anxiously awaiting the surge of #COVID19 patients in San Francisco,” Fahimi tweeted on March 27. “The number of hospital cases increase slowly daily. But, it hit me today ... we are in a flattened curve.”
Peter ChinHong, an infectious disease specialist and medical professor, said in an interview with The Chronicle that he was inspired to tweet about COVID19 when it became clear there was an absence of scientific information coming from federal officials to combat rumors and falsehoods circulating among the public.
“What prompted me to start tweeting was the fact that we’re not getting a central scientific voice on the pandemic in the U.S.,” ChinHong said, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the nation’s top public health agency — hasn’t held a press briefing since March 14.
ChinHong has tweeted frequently about the need for more testing, saying the U.S. should be embarrassed at the low number of tests it’s conducted compared with other countries.
A chart showing this data left him “enraged,” he tweeted Thursday. “Really need #testing in the community. #US in the era of the most infections in the world has one of the worst #COVID19 testing records on earth.”
ChinHong has also started tweeting about social justice issues, including discrimination against the Chinese during the coronavirus outbreak. Most of his tweets, though, are about the science of COVID19, attempting to answer questions about cleaning masks for reuse (don’t microwave them) or whether the virus travels in exhaled cigarette smoke.
“#COVID19 is lazy & likes the water while commuting,” he tweeted. “It rides the short distance on a droplet rather than the particulate matter in #smoke & likely not a factor in transmission. This is the nature of the beast in all #respiratoryviruses.”
ChinHong said the public deserves factual answers to questions in simple language.
“I’m just bringing some science behind it,” he said.
Wachter said he started tweeting regularly about the virus when “it struck me that we were in the middle of something historic and the need for information was there.”
Before the pandemic, he had about 22,000 followers on Twitter. He now has more than 43,000 followers, a number that has left him astonished considering some of his tweets have been viewed by more than a quartermillion people.
“If you don’t fill the space with real facts,” Wachter said, “it gets filled with rumor and misinformation.”