The Problem with ‘Patient Zero’ in Coronavirus News.
This Q&A was originally published as a tip sheet in Journalist’s Resource.
Infectious disease researchers have criticized newsrooms for using phrases such as “patient zero” and “party zero” in their coronavirus coverage to describe a person or social event believed to have caused a local COVID-19 outbreak.
Why is this a bad idea? Journalist’s Resource asked Helen Jenkins, an infectious disease epidemiologist who’s an assistant professor of biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health, to explain. Bottom line: Using these terms is both irresponsible and inaccurate, she says.
Below are our questions and her emailed responses, lightly edited for clarity.
Why is it a bad idea for journalists to pursue a “patient zero” or “party zero” angle?
The concept of ‘patient zero’ is highly stigmatizing and often wrong anyway. No single person should be ‘blamed’ for starting an outbreak. Outbreaks occur for a number of reasons and there is never any practical use in the media to attributing the beginning of an outbreak to one person. In addition, this is often incorrect as there can be multiple introductions to a place (as there undoubtedly have been in the US) and attributing hundreds of thousands (as we now have) of cases to one initial one is just wrong.
Are the terms “patient zero” and “party zero” themselves problematic?
In the media, definitely. There might be times in scientific reports that an initial person is identified in an outbreak. The purposes of this are to understand when and how the pathogen was introduced to the human population. That is important scientifically to understand how we might prevent these occurrences in the future (for example, spillover events when a pathogen moves from an animal population into humans) but I do not see any reason to use these terms themselves, especially not by journalists.
What should journalists be doing instead?
Instead, I think the media has a huge role to play in getting the right messages out to the public regarding what they should be doing now to help prevent further transmission—stay at home, or at least reduce your contacts with other people to as few as possible, wash hands regularly, don’t touch your face, definitely stay home if you have symptoms.
And the public needs to understand that there will be time lag between transmission and hospitalizations and deaths. So, if you are in a place that is under ‘lockdown,’ the benefits will not be seen immediately.
Instead, we need to stick with what we are doing and, after four weeks or so, we will hopefully start to see an easing on the healthcare system. These measures won’t last forever, but they are the only tools we have at the moment to slow transmission and relieve the burden on our hospitals.