  The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global infodemic that has brought
unprecedented challenges for citizens, media, and fact-checkers worldwide. To
address this challenge, over a hundred fact-checking initiatives worldwide have
been monitoring the information space in their countries and publishing regular
debunks of viral false COVID-19 narratives. This study examines the database of
the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, which contains 10,381 debunks related to
COVID-19 published in multiple languages by different fact-checking
organisations. Our spatiotemporal analysis reveals that similar or nearly
duplicate false COVID-19 narratives have been spreading in multiple modalities
and on various social media platforms in different countries, sometimes as much
as several months after the first debunk of that narrative has been published
by an International Fact-checking Network (IFCN) fact-checker. We also find
that misinformation involving general medical advice has spread across multiple
countries and hence has the highest proportion of false COVID-19 narratives
that keep being debunked. Furthermore, as manual fact-checking is an onerous
task in itself, therefore the need to repeatedly debunk the same narrative in
different countries is leading, over time, to a significant waste of
fact-checker resources. To this end, we propose the idea of including a
multilingual debunk search tool in the fact-checking pipeline, in addition to
recommending strongly that social media platforms need to adopt the same
technology at scale, so as to make the best use of scarce fact-checker
resources.
