Between January and February, the FRANCE 24 Observers team met with a class of students at the Paul Valéry high school in Paris to answer their questions about disinformation and to share tips on how to sort out the real from the fake.
The students were particularly interested in the misinformation circulating around the Covid-19 pandemic, especially videos showing self-tests reacting positively to tap water. For some people online, these videos proved that Covid-19 could be present in tap water. Others questioned how reliable Covid self-tests really are.
In class, students researched and noticed that similar videos were circulating in other countries, such as Spain and the UK. They decided to talk to Laurent Andreolleti, a virologist at the University Hospital of Reims, in a video interview.
To use a self-test, "you have to read the instructions, follow each of the steps correctly and use only the elements that are in the box in order to have a good result", explained Laurent Andreolleti.
He also responded to rumours about the presence of Covid-19 in water:
If you put water or Coke, whatever you want on the test, it is not made for that. It will change the parameters of the test because it's just a colorimetric test with an oxidation. So, at that point, it's not valid anymore. If I put water, it's a false positive, there's no infectious virus in the water.
Water, as such, can contain fragments of Covid RNA, especially waste water. But in tap water, there are none. In...
The President of the Association of Yorubas in Diaspora, South Africa, Dr Olusola Agbeniyi, has asked the senator representing Edo North, Adams Oshiomhole, to desist from making what he described ...