There's a lot of misinformation floating around, and it can be hard to know whether you're reading reasonable commentary, sensationalized content, or flat out misinformation. Here are some good sources of information about COVID-19 that are written to be accessible to the general public.

Agencies

For local news about COVID-19, your first stop for information should be the website of your local public health authority; they will have the information that is most relevant to your area. In addition to those agencies, the following sites have very detailed and highly reliable information about a broad range of COVID-19-related topic areas, including prevention, therapeutics, and vaccines.

• US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• World Health Organization
• WHO Myth Busters
• US FDA
• Amref Health Africa
• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

Scientific News Agencies

In general, quality of COVID-19 coverage varies broadly across news outlets. It's highly recommended that you look at the reliability of a news outlet when evaluating the quality of its information. Even the best news outlets, however, sometimes get things wrong or overinterpret scientific evidence beyond that is actually supported. Here are some science-oriented news outlets or scientific journal briefings that are useful for understanding the science as it develops in a more reliable way.

• Science Media Centre
• The Scientist
• STAT News
• CIDRAP from the University of Minnesota
• Nature Briefings
• Science Magazine

Science Blogs

Though it's often not ideal to get your information from the blogosphere at large, there are some high-quality blogs and podcasts that are produced by highly qualified individuals and that present the data in a measured and responsible way.

• In the Pipeline
• This Week in Virology

Science Twitter

Twitter is usually a terrible place to get high-quality information. These scientists tend to be the exception to that rule. Please note: though these scientists tend to be pretty reasonable in their interpretation and presentation of data, even these tweets should be interpreted with caution as the opinion of a single individual (albeit a highly trained and qualified one).

Presented in no particular order:

• Derek Lowe
• Eric Topol
• Angela Rasmussen
• Carl Bergstrom
• Kai Kupferschmidt
• Emma Hodcroft
• Akiko Iwasaki
• Nathan Grubaugh
• Isaac Bogoch
• Vincent Racaniello
• Trevor Bedford
• Monica Gandhi
• Francois Ballous
• Florian Krammer
• Scott Gottlieb

More Technical Resources

As discussed below, these resources should be interpreted cautiously; they're often written in a very technical manner that may not be easy to understand, and the limitations of the data may not be immediately obvious without careful analysis. With that caveat, some very high quality sources of more technical, scientific information are:

• The New England Journal of Medicine
• The Lancet
• Cell
• Science
• Nature
• US CDC MMWR

Some Notes of Caution

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a proliferation of interest in research and research studies. This is, of course, a good thing -- it's important for people to be informed about the state of the field and about the development of the science on this critical topic. However, it's also important to be cautious in interpreting scientific studies, even those presented in the best journals. It's well known that much work in the biological sciences is questionable and difficult to replicate, and a single study should never be taken as definitive in and of itself. Studies -- even in the top journals -- are not always high quality. There's always methodological issues with every study that is published, and being able to distinguish the important issues from the less relevant issues takes practice. Authors of scientific papers often make broad claims or may overgeneralize their results without having the data to fully support their interpretations; being able to identify when that is the case takes practice. And sometimes (rarely, but sometimes), researchers fake their data or otherwise engage in scientific misconduct. Without being able to place the study in the broader context of the scientific literature on that topic and related topics, it's easy to misinterpret or overinterpret studies.

One notable example of this phenomenon is the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database. This database is not a verified compilation of adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines (or any vaccine); this database compiles self-reported, unverified claims from anyone that says they have been vaccinated and chooses to send them an alleged adverse event that happened after they got vaccinated. There is virtually no attempt made to verify or confirm the truth of these claims, let alone their association with the vaccine; in one famous example, a doctor reported that the flu vaccine turned him into the Hulk, and it was accepted to the database. The purpose of VAERS is very limited -- it is meant to provide highly trained and qualified researchers to analyze the data for statistical aberrations with considerable effort needed to sort out the garbage from the potentially true signal. And even then, VAERS analysis is just the beginning; much more targeted and rigorous studies are needed to actually determine whether an adverse event is vaccine related. Basically, VAERS is a tool that can be used as a hypothesis generator for researchers -- it should not be interpreted to actually resemble anything even approaching reality.

The point is: when looking for information about COVID-19, exercise caution. Even the sources we have listed above sometimes get things wrong -- sometimes because new data causes a reevaluation of hypotheses and models, and sometimes just because humans make mistakes. Don't get your information from any one source, and don't take any one viewpoint to be the gospel.

Even then, expect to be wrong sometimes -- we've all been wrong at points throughout this pandemic. What's more important is to be willing to update your views as you get more information and to not hold steadfastly in the face of evidence to the contrary. If you look for good sources of information, think critically about it, and are willing to accept change, you'll probably be fine.