When Your Doctor Is on TikTok

In the second week of March 2020, uncertainty ruled TikTok. Students shared clips of school PA systems announcing closures and cancellations. Travelers filmed their frantic efforts to return to the U.S. before President Donald Trump’s border restrictions went into effect. And yet many users speculated that warnings of a life-reordering pandemic were overblown. Comment sections seemed angsty, but conspiracies abounded, hinting at the diverging versions of reality that lay ahead.

As the first wave of coronavirus shutdowns began, an epidemiologist named Katrine Wallace joined TikTok to combat her boredom and isolation. Wallace, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, watched as the viral dances and humor of “quarantine” took over the app, but she told me that she didn’t consider making any kind of video herself until the app’s algorithm began showing her coronavirus conspiracy theories.

“At that point in time, it was, like, the conspiracy that the disease.”