Original article (in Montenegrin) was published on 19/08/2021
Montenegro too fails to dodge disinformation, conspiracy theories and fake news about the coronavirus. This is evident from the increasingly common claims posted on social media with the aim of deceiving the public and painting a distorted image of reality.
The latest such example is found in a Facebook post that discusses the number of vaccinated citizens in Montenegro, but also the total number of those who have been infected with the coronavirus thus far.
“More than 400,000 people in Montenegro have been infected so far, and roughly 250,000 people have been vaccinated. So, who does this 400-infections-per-day data refer to? Are there 15 million of us or are there in fact 600,000 of us who had already been either infected or vaccinated?”, says the author of the post.
Although Montenegro has indeed seen an increase in the number of new infections on a daily basis in the past few weeks, the data presented in this post are certainly not accurate.
The website of the Institute of Public Health of Montenegro posts daily updates for numbers of new coronavirus infections, as well as for the total number of Montenegrin citizens that have been infected since the outbreak of the pandemic.
“Since the onset of the epidemic (March 2020), the number of registered cases of coronavirus infections in Montenegro has totalled 107,576,” reads the COVID-19 Data Breakdown published on the IPH website on August 18.
Additionally, the Facebook post contains an inaccurate figure on those vaccinated against Covid in Montenegro.
The Government’s website covidodgovor.me has published data on the number of those vaccinated as of August 18, which shows that 198,891 Montenegrin citizens had received their first dose by that time, 168,543 of which had received the second dose, i.e. are fully vaccinated.