Last month a twitter user called Traceyz18 tweeted out the following message:
I feel so upset. 2 nurses who were in ITU [intenstive therapy unit] in Swansea have died today. 3 more still ventilated. All from the same unit. My heart is breaking.
This would be very sad, if true. But, as it turns out, it is not – the official twitter of Swansea’s NHS trust actually responded:
This is incorrect. We have not had any nurse deaths in our ITU department and your tweet is causing anxiety.
The rational response to this, if it were just a misunderstanding, would be for “Tracey” to say “oops, sorry, I was misinformed” and then either correct the tweet or remove it.
Instead, her account has been deleted.
…which is strange.
It’s possible “Tracey” was simply so inundated with people calling her a liar/idiot/troll etc. that she got sick of it and deleted the account, everyone on social media feels like that sometimes.
But that doesn’t really address the critical issue.
The key question isn’t really “who is Tracey?” or “Why is her account gone?” But rather, how did she come by the false information?
Assuming she didn’t make it up herself, who told her it was true?
Somewhere along the line somebody somewhere told a lie. They claimed five nurses were seriously ill and two of them had died based on nothing. A story which, coincidentally, lines up with the media scare-stories about how NHS staff are in terrible danger (when they’re not).’
Read more: Tracey Z and the nurses who never died
