Last week, I was talking on the ´phone to a friend in the US who was in Oman with us in the nineties. She was saying how having been there during the gulf war, and having previously been in Iran during the revolution, she felt she was better prepared than most US citizens for whatever the pandemic might bring. Interesting and true, as one thing I learned from the gulf war was that there were lots of people ready to spread panic by broadcasting fake news. People were "quoting" sources saying that the Iraquies had already passed through Saudi and were in northern Oman, and suchlike stuff. It was all rubbish of course, and the sources did not stand up to scrutiny. I quickly learned to ask people where their information had come from, and if it was word of mouth, to discount it immediately.
The key was to establish who was putting out the real news, then only to follow that.
Today I received a message from a friend telling me that Mijas was about to go into a local lockdown. He actually quoted a newspaper, but on reading it, I could see that it was just alarmism - and, as I pointed out to my pal, the junta are so idle tthey don´t produce or correlate statistics over the weekend, thus nothing was likely to change until next week anyway. The actual data shows the trend is still upwards towards the point where they impose such a "local" lockdown, shutting all non-essential businesses, but the whole point of the current measures is to try to stop that happening.
I double checked by going to our local councillor´s website, only to find a rant about the number of irresponsible people spreading news about an imminent lockdown, when that could only be implemented at national level (see screenshot).
Well, at least he does share one viewpoint with me.
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