Table 1.

The main analogies between epidemics and infodemics

Features	Epidemics	Infodemics
Agent	Infectious agent (i.e., virus, bacterium, fungus, parasite…)	Type of message in a given medium (e.g., particular conspiracy theory in a viral video, a statistic on vaccine efficacy in a tweet)
Medium	Route of transmission (respiratory, oral-fecal route, sexual contacts…)	Communication channel (news, social media platform, newsgroup, radio program, blog…)
Timescale	Infectious period, reproductive number	How quickly information spreads and accumulates, including the persistence of mis- and dis-information
Network of interaction	The pattern of contacts along which transmission occurs (individuals who have a contact at risk for transmission)	Communication network for the user and content interaction (nodes of transmission, interconnectedness, clustering, homophily, content filtering algorithms)
Control measures	Actions to limit the epidemic (vaccination campaigns, non-pharmaceutical interventions, epidemiological surveillance)	Actions to limit the infodemic (skill building, science and media literacy, pre-bunking)