In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Before COVID-19 had reached the United States in significant numbers, there were countless conspiracy theories about what it “really” was and who was behind it. The “infodemic” was so virulent that many people’s first knowledge of the pandemic was the disinformation about the pandemic.

As the virus spread around Asia and Europe in early 2020, rumors ran almost unchecked alongside it. The internet became a dull throb of fear about “Coronavirus Death Smog” from all the bodies China was secretly burning, or China using it as an engineered bioweapon that would wipe out humanity, or that the outbreak was “foretold” in a 1981 Dean Koontz novel. The disinformation had penetrated places it would take the virus itself months to reach. As a result, when COVID truly impacted the U.S. in mid-March, many Americans knew little about the virus other than what they’d heard online, and had been inundated with false claims and scapegoating of Asian Americans. 

Conspiracism instantly became a major factor in how the pandemic was responded to and treated. And it happened incredibly quickly, as hundreds of millions of people found paranoia and fearmongering in their COVID isolation. The infamous disinformation superspreader video Plandemic took just one day to shoot and two weeks to edit, cost $2,000, and was released less than two months into lockdown — instantly gathering millions of views and shares. It went from non-existent to almost inescapable in a remarkably short amount of time.

Disinformation and conspiracy theories are now often the first point of contact we have with a rapidly-developing news story. We hear the myths and rumors before we even know what we’re hearing them about.

And the same process has been playing out with the recent hantavirus outbreak centered on the cruise ship MV Hondius. While passengers started showing symptoms in early April, reporting on the outbreak didn’t start until early May, by which time three passengers had died — the only fatalities so far. Given the severity of........

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