An official UK government web page about COVID-19 has been shared tens of thousands of times on social media as supposed “evidence” for a conspiracy theory that politicians are overhyping the coronavirus crisis and using it to control the public.

The page has had big boosts from online communities dedicated to spreading debunked conspiracy theories about 5G mobile networks, the “New World Order” and “chemtrails” — the false belief that governments pump chemical agents into the sky to control the public.

A post written by Public Health England for the official GOV.UK website says “as of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK”, after it was initially classified as such in January.

A HCID is a category of diseases with extremely high death rates like Ebola virus, Middle East Respiratory Fever (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The coronavirus is “highly transmissible between humans as demonstrated by the speed of the pandemic, but it isn’t the most deadly of pathogens in terms of the infectious dose required to be lethal,” according to Professor Brendan Wren of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“Only 1% of infected humans succumb to the infection. This compares to, for example, 11% for SARS1 and 50% for Ebola” he told BuzzFeed News. As a result, the disease was downgraded for scientific research purposes.

However, Wren continued: “This slight downgrading doesn’t detract from the seriousness of Covid-19 infection.” He pointed out that the ease with which the virus spreads means it it has infected and killed far more people than recent outbreaks of SARS and Ebola.

The Public Health England post does set out all these details lower down the page, but internet conspiracy theorists have highlighted the opening sentence and circulated it in a misleading way.

A post by the Facebook page Energy Therapy, liked by 2 million people, shares a screenshot of the government page and says:

“If COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID), at least in the UK, according to the UK government's own website, why do we have a continuous fear-based narrative from the MAINSTREAM MEDIA that things will ONLY GET WORSE?”