Media toolbox virus

While some fully vaccinated people can spread Delta, COVID vaccines provide effective protection from hospitalization, severe disease, and death. New data show Delta is different than past versions of the virus; it is much more contagious. While rare, some vaccinated people can get Delta in a breakthrough infection and may be contagious. Everyone in areas of substantial or high transmission should wear a mask indoors in public, even if they are vaccinated.

But the more a virus spreads, the more it mutates, and more variants can emerge. Being fully vaccinated can help stop more dangerous variants from emerging. Some fully vaccinated people can spread Delta, but COVID vaccines provide protection from hospitalization, severe disease, and death. The more a virus spreads, the more it mutates, and the more variants can emerge.

COVID19 vaccinations help stop more dangerous variants from emerging. Social Media Toolkit. Know the common symptoms of flu. More Video Resources. Print Ready Materials. Your work is essential! Print Resources. Web Resources. Fight Flu x Find flu vaccines in your area. Everyone 6 months of age and older needs a flu vaccine. SM platforms can be used as a potential tool to spread awareness, mitigate anxiety and disseminate useful information like guidelines, advisories and helplines.

Ye et al. In the current scenario of the COVID pandemic, the need for creating awareness in the community cannot be overemphasised. Equally important is understanding the response of people in SM that can be tracked and used in policy issues and decisions by policy-makers. In a systematic review, Al-Garadi et al. SM are used for faster communication of information during crises like conveying warnings, inquiries, complaints, feedback response, introducing appropriate interventions, initiating action in the community and coordinating volunteer services.

The networking speed of SM helps in coordinating emergency planning, mobilising activities and raising funds. Zadeh et al. This will help in creating awareness much before the spread of disease and helps in more effective interventions to reduce the spread.

Ebola outbreak was highlighted by media in frequently more than 10 million tweets in 20 days from countries and CDC predicted that 1. Based on the cultural and behavioural differences, the crisis communication plan needs to be specific to the local audience. International cooperation and public-private partnerships are facilitated by SM during crisis.

Epidemic outbreaks need extensive networking within hospital, between other hospitals, testing laboratories, community centres and NGOs and with patients. SM platforms can be effectively used to reach out to patients and healthcare information seekers in the local community by hospital staff. It is critical for medical professionals to engage patients for follow-up, monitoring and tracing in highly infectious diseases.

Locating and monitoring suspects or contacts could be done using location tracking technologies linked with accounts. Often criticism of social media campaigns is focused on the digital divide, particularly in LMICs.

The fact remains that no single communication tool can reach everyone. The digital divide is a harsh reality. The fundamental to any communication strategy is a media mix that delivers the message based on the target group it intends to connect with.

Social media campaigns are consequently needed to be focused on those who have access to mobile technology and Internet services. Communication between people, individuals or groups, is supplemented by many unique aspects which can be verbal or non-verbal in nature. Despite the emoticons and the wide variety in which information can be showcased on SM, the complexities of human interactions played out between people or groups in a physical environment and the absence of nuances of communication—expressions, tones of voice, sentiments of empathy which are seen, felt and understood during one-on-one interactions in a physical social environment have not yet been replicated on social media, despite the complex algorithms that are adding to the list of human addictions in many societies.

Health education campaigns operate within the framework of a context, time and geography. Given the nature of the social media certain pieces of information continue to be in circulation long after its time has run out and new development and research have made it outdated and irrelevant. Like any health promotion campaign, SM health campaigns need to be operationalised in an enabling environment that supports the call to action or the intended behaviour change.

If the call to action is to wash hands, it is also important to ensure that clean water, soap or sanitiser is available to people. Similarly, health settings awareness initiatives on handling and disposal of biomedical waste should be guided by local policy and supported by the availability of essential resources like disinfection tools and incinerators. In its absence, awareness alone will not drive change. Moorhead et al. Another major concern is about security, privacy and confidentiality as users are unaware of the disclosure of information.

Online consultations may reduce direct interaction of patients and doctors as there may be reduced hospital visits. In developing countries, low Internet connectivity due to lack of infrastructure and technology and high costs of Internet services can lead to limited use of SM. One of the major limitation of using SM is the reliability or genuineness of the content shared.

Since SM is an open channel of communication involving all citizens including non-professionals, there are numerous misconceptions and rumours being spread. Rumours add noise to the information in SM and may form a barrier in the evaluation of data [ 40 ]. Spreading rumours in the community creates panic, fear, anxiety and confusion and may even lead to wrong practices among the population. This is the Achilles heel of SM. According to the WHO, an infodemic is an over-abundance of information, some accurate and some not that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.

It poses a serious problem for public health since people need this guidance to know what actions to take to protect themselves and others and help mitigate the impact of a disease.

In the context of the COVID pandemic, the infodemic is exacerbated by the global scale of the emergency and propagated by the interconnected way that information is disseminated and consumed through social media platforms and other channels. Since there is no regulation on what content is shared and who shares, it is important to screen and validate the content through useful tools. One way of reducing this is having official government accounts or accounts of reliable international and national health agencies with specific icons.

Constant education of the community about the right use of SM and about rumours is essential to tackle this problem. Another way of ensuring authenticity is to use artificial intelligence integrated into the mobile phones to integrate sensor technology, GPS and SM information. Filtering tools have been developed to reduce time spent reading irrelevant messages and untrustworthy sources. Laws prohibiting spreading of rumours has been fund to be useful in controlling misinformation in some countries.

SM has ushered in a new avenue in healthcare by offering a platform that can be utilised by public, patients and health professionals to communicate about health issues.

Infection prevention and control is an underutilised intervention, which holds a promise for reducing the burden of many infectious diseases both in communities and hospitals. To implement IPC, a multimodule approach is recommended which requires disseminating the IPC resource materials, organise trainings and capture IPC-related breaches in real time.

IPC is therefore seen by health administrators as resource-intensive intervention. SM can be used as a potential tool to widen the reach of knowledge and information on IPC in community settings and hospitals. Many hospitals are already using mobile apps for training their staff and for gathering the HAI surveillance data.

Application of SM for health communication purposes, including IPC, is an expanding area and more research is required to establish whether SM improves IPC practices in both short and long terms.

Better geographical identification system, enhanced computational linguistics and advanced algorithms are required to overcome the existing challenges in using SM. As it evolves, greater accountability is being demanded from not just SM companies, but also its users. Positive steps are being taken for example fact-checkers and user account verification; for example, the blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.

The potential of social media is tremendous and its use as a health promotion tool for IPC for various target groups including healthcare professionals and members of the community can reap rich dividends. Jayaprakasam Madhumathi declares that she has no conflict of interest. Rina Sinha declares that she has no conflict of interest. Balaji Veeraraghavan declares that he has no conflict of interest. Kamini Walia declares that she has no conflict of interest. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Curr Treat Options Infect Dis. Jayaprakasam Madhumathi , Ph. D, 3 and Kamini Walia , Ph. D,MPH 1. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Kamini Walia, Email: ni. Corresponding author. Accepted Nov This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.

Details required : characters remaining Cancel Submit 12 people found this reply helpful. I recently lost my hard drive on my desktop. I don't have a copy of Windows 7 to reinstall when my new drive arrives today.

I had hoped there was a Win 7 version of the media creation tool, but have been unable to find one. Recently had to do this with my laptop running Windows 8 and it was a breeze. Am a little hesitant to go back to Windows 10, but am not sure what my options are for Win 7 seeing I have no install media.

I do have the product key on the machine. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread. I have the same question Report abuse.