The answer seems to be: nobody!

With Covid raging on, we are all living under fear and stress. Countries such as China, New Zealand, or Japan that succeeded in keeping it contained, are hunkering down behind Chinese Walls, while the rest of the World is desperately searching for miracle cures. Our daily life is heavily influenced by coping and surviving under Covid19. Self-proclaimed Covid19 experts are inundating us with a never-ending stream of news and insights. These experts come from two opposing sides: mainstream science and government experts on the one side, and conspiracy theorists on the other side.  Figuring out whom to believe, with so many “experts” contradicting each other can become a real headache. Politicians, regulators, and scientists in different countries, and even within the same country, are fundamentally disagreeing and fighting with each other about the best strategies for coping with the disease. 

To shed some light, we did a coolhunting using Galaxyscope, creating two digital tribes, “Covid-Experts”, and “Alt-health” (spiritual healing believers, Covid deniers, and fringe conspiracy theorists). The picture below shows the two networks. 

While the Covid-Experts form a solid cluster, Alt-health has some separate clusters, connected by a few gatekeepers. However, the most shocking insight is that DrTedros the director of the WHO, the World Health Organization, who should take the lead in the fight against Covid19, appears in both networks – at the periphery. This means that mainstream science and spiritual healers are both desperately looking for leadership – and not finding it.

In the Covid Experts community, people like Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps translational institute, Helen Branswell, a Canadian global health reporter, and Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist, occupy the central positions. In the Alt-Health cluster, activists like FLAutismMom, Brett Weinstein and Spiro Skouras are in the center.

The picture below shows the two Twitter word clouds of the two tribes, with the central term “Covid19” removed, because it would overly dominate the word cloud.  While the experts talk about approaches for fighting Covid such as contact tracing and NIH, the alt health members talked about the Fox TV show “the masked singer” which became highly popular as a way of coping with Covid-related stress, but almost went under in the summer when its host Nick Cannon made anti-Semitic remarks.

The picture below shows the main words used by experts and alt-health members as word networks, where a connecting line between two words means that the two words appear in the same tweet. Experts recommend wearing a mask as the key Covid-prevention measure. Alt-health members lead a far more wide-ranging discussion with different word clusters, the Bill Gates conspiracy is in the center, and attacking Dr Fauci, the main US government Covid expert. Trump, Maga, and the “proud boys”, appear in the periphery.

Looking at the tweeting activity on the charts below, the experts are far more active tweeting about Covid than are the alt-health members. Alt-health members tweet more about non-Covid topics related to conservative politics, such as bikingthebattleground of conservative commentator Cheryl Chumley. 

Looking at the emotions associated with Covid, there is no noticeable difference between Covid experts and alt health. Fear and sadness dominate for both experts and alt health members in the emotion charts below. Happiness is low for experts and even lower for alt health members, and fear is high for experts and alt health members alike. 

In the comparison charts of the two tribes below, we see that while experts tweet much more, the two tribes have little overlap in membership, although some Covid experts are positioned right among the alt health tribe members by our positioning algorithm. The dark blue dots at the bottom of the scatter plot below at right stand for Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley and Seema Yasmin, an epidemiologist, who use language in their tweets more typical of alt health.

Looking at the membership in predefined virtual tribes below, we find that the experts are more treehuggers, while the alt health members are also fatherlanders (ultrapatriots), while there are none among the experts. Some alt health members not surprisingly have been categorized as spiritualists.

Personality-wise, the experts use a lot of political and journalist language, while the alt health members are more categorized as risk-takers and stock traders.

Covid experts are more capitalist than alt health members, which is not surprising as they work for the US government, pharmaceuticals, and academia, while some alt health members are seen as socialist in the way they speak.

In conclusion, we see that fear and sadness dominate the Covid19 discourse, with experts recommending handwashing and mask wearing, while the alt health members see conspiracies everywhere, and recommend miracle cures against Covid such as Melatonin and Vitamin C instead of having to wear masks. Both groups place strong emphasis on maintaining mental health among all the chaos. The main insight is that there are no accepted leaders, and very little trust in science. Everybody seems to hunker down and hope for better times – which undoubtedly will come, as they always have, we just don’t know when!

Many thanks again to Karin Frick from GDI for doing the coolhunting.