If fear is like fire, hoax can be the gasoline. The two are the recipe for panic, and and this happened in Ukraine.
It began when a mass email claiming to be from Ukraine’s Health Ministry went viral. In the email, it was said that there were five cases of coronavirus in the country, on the same day a plane carrying evacuees from China arrived.
This sparked a series of violent protests, in which protesters clashed with riot police in several places in Ukraine, resulting to several injuries.
The local residents protested the plans to quarantine the evacuees at a hospital in the settlement of Novi Sanzhary, in Ukraine’s central Poltava region, where it was said that 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreign citizens, as well as 22 crew members and doctors are going to be quarantined for at least 14 days to make sure they aren’t carrying the virus.
Protesters have smashed the windows of the six buses carrying evacuees and set fire to makeshift barricades.
They were all afraid that the evacuees could be brought there and their children would get infected, and all that despite there being no confirmed information or cases from the officials.
The government was forced to even dispatched the Prime Minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk, the Interior Minister, Arsen Avakov, the Health Minister Zoryana Skaletska to the village to deal with the misinformation.
According to a web page at the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) website, the email that was sent to Ministry of Health’s entire contact list, had actually originated from outside Ukraine.
Only two Ukrainians have been infected with the coronavirus and they are all aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan, and they've already recovered.
"Attention! The reports about five confirmed cases of COVID-19 coronavirus in Ukraine are UNTRUE," said the Center for Public Health. "We urge the media not to disseminate this information and to inform the press service of the Health Ministry of Ukraine of the sender of this information upon receipt of the letter."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the authorities are doing everything they can to make sure the virus wouldn’t spread to Ukraine. In a statement posted to Facebook, he urged the protesters to show empathy, and called Ukrainians to calm down as they weren’t in danger.
There is no risk of infection, said Zelensky, only “the danger of forgetting that we are all human and we are all Ukrainians.” He said that the panic showed “far from the best side of our character.”
Oleksiy Kucher, the governor of the Kharkiv region where the plane carrying Ukrainian evacuees from China’s Hubei province landed, said that people must “not to sow panic - everything is fine. All who are on board are healthy.”
The coronavirus has spread fear among people all over the world, ever since the outbreak started in Wuhan, China, back in December 2019.
The fear has cancelled the 2020 Mobile World Congress, affected Apple's supply chain and revenue in a bad way and others among a few.
And in Ukraine where trust in the health care system and the government is low, the email disinformation caused widespread fear that even the Public Health's message had difficult times in getting through.
The panic in Ukraine also came as China, which has on several occasions, changed how it reports new coronavirus infections.
The cumulative total of Wuhan coronavirus infections globally has reached 75,778 with 2,130 deaths, mostly in central Hubei province.
With so many people searching for information online about coronavirus, there is continued risk that people may come across misinformation and hoaxes about the deadly disease.
Most platforms, including search engines and social media networks are equipped to handle fast-changing events, but unfortunately, they can have a hard time in dealing with flood of user-generated posts that may have some disinformation within them.
Earlier, similar protests happened in Mykulyntsi of Ternopil region, Ukraine, because of rumors about possible placement of evacuees from China.