Pandemic Communication

This book examines how we design and deliver health communication messages relating to outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. We have experienced major changes to how the public receives and searches for information about health crises over the last twelve decades with the ongoing shift from text/broadcast-based to digital messaging and social media. Both health theories and practices are examined as it applies to testing, tracking, hoarding, therapeutics, and vaccines with case studies. Challenges to communicate about health to diverse audiences (including the science illiterate) and across (both Western and developing economies) have been complicated by politics, norms and mores, personal heuristics, and biases, such as mortality salience, news avoidance, and quarantine fatigue. Issues of economic development and land use, trade and transportation, and even climate change have increased the exposure of human populations to infectious diseases making risk and resilience more pressing. The book has been designed to support health communicators and public health management professionals, students, and interested stakeholders and university libraries.

This book details how the processes of communication are affected by the presence of a pandemic and establishes a research agenda for those effects across the broad field of communication studies. Through contributions from experts in communication subdisciplines such as crisis, organizational, interpersonal, health, intergroup, and intercultural, this book provides the reader with a comprehensive view of the emerging field of study "pandemic communication." Each chapter has four primary objectives to: (1) define critical issues for pandemic communication from its subdiscipline’s perspective, (2) examine how communication varies during pandemic(s), (3) provide examples of how pandemic(s) havefor affected communication, and (4) propose a research agenda to build pandemic communication theory. This book is suited to undergraduate or post-graduate courses or modules in communication studies across a variety of subdisciplines as well as a reference for researchers in the subject.

This truly interdisciplinary volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore changes in the significance of media and communication in the era of pandemic. The book answers two interrelated questions: how media and communication reality changed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how media and communication were effectively studied during this time. The book presents changes in media and communication in three areas: media production, media content, and media usage contexts. It then describes the theoretical and practical, methodological, technical, organizational, and ethical challenges in conducting research in circumstances of sudden change in research conditions, emergency situations and developing crises. Drawing on various theoretical studies and empirical research, the volume illustrates the principles and results of applying diverse research methods to the changing role of media in a pandemic and offers good practices and guidance to address the problems in implementing research projects in a time of sudden difficulties and challenges. This diverse and interdisciplinary book will be of significance to scholars and researchers in media studies, communication studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003232049-5/ecological-approach-fausto-colombo?context=ubx&refId=aa5bc500-bb40-4ccb-879b-d5c8562efa67

Silver Award Winner from the Nonfiction Authors Association “The book is equal parts ‘how-to guide’ for effective health communications and a memoir of surviving a global pandemic. I appreciated reading about Burke-Garcia’s personal reflections about her experiences of isolation, uncertainty and exhaustion during quarantine. She shares her experiences and observations in a relatable and accessible manner. Knowing about the author’s personal struggles made me lean into what she had to share from her professional experience leading a communications campaign. Throughout the book, she explores data and research about communication needs among people from diverse groups and presents a sensible critique of the media environment.” – Nonfiction Book Award Outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics are nothing new. Over the last several decades, we have been through numerous—Zika, Ebola, H1N1. The COVID‐19 pandemic, however, has challenged us like never before. During this time, we have struggled to work remotely, to balance work and children’s school schedules, and to manage finances in the face of lost or furloughed jobs. We have worried about our loved ones getting sick and being able to support themselves, and we have faced the loneliness that comes with social distancing. It has affected us individually and globally—but we have not all experienced this pandemic in exactly the same way. Some communities have been hit harder in terms of sickness and death rates from COVID‐19. Many have felt the economic pressures of the pandemic more acutely. Still others have struggled disproportionately with the mental health impacts. Context has mattered in this pandemic. There is one common thread that runs through everything we have experienced though: the role that communication has played in managing this pandemic. Whether we are talking about communication about the virus and mitigation strategies, communication between friends and family, the urgent crisis resulting in mis- and dis-information, our complex and diffuse media environment, or new workplace communication strategies, communication has been front and center in this pandemic. The role of communication has been integral to the success and failure of our ability to respond and adapt to and begin to recover from this pandemic—as individuals, collectively as communities, and as countries. As a result, issues such as preparedness, misinformation, literacy and comprehension of virus and vaccine science, health equity and mental health have all gained increased awareness during this time. This book unpacks the many and varied roles that communication has played over the course of this pandemic, in order to help public health professionals, marketers and health communicators, and policymakers alike to understand what we have been through, what has worked well, and what we have struggled with. It will help us learn from our experiences, so we communicate through pandemics more successfully in the future.

"This book focuses on what is arguably the most devastating phenomenon in the history of modern civilization, the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how, on the one hand, the pandemic has exposed governments the world over to deal with a major health crisis; and, on the other, efforts by the ruling forces to enforce surveillance on people and disciplining them by maneuvering cutting-edge digital technology in the name of security and safety. Second, it explores how the mainstream versions of crisis communication and risk communication face huge challenges during a pandemic. Finally, it analyses how the pandemic propels an extraordinary expansion of infodemic - rapid spread of excessive quantities of misinformation and disinformation of the fake and false variety - and how social media in particular becomes its main tool in causing subversion of the prevalent information order. Engaging, comprehensive and accessible, this book will be of immense importance to scholars and researchers of politics, especially governance and political communication, communication studies, and public health management. It will be vital for public policy professionals, experts in thinktanks, career bureaucrats, and non-governmental organizations"--

Rev. ed. of: Introduction to pandemic influenza. c2010.

This guidance is an update of WHO global influenza preparedness plan: the role of WHO and recommendations for national measures before and during pandemics, published March 2005 (WHO/CDS/CSR/GIP/2005.5).

Timely text authored by leading political communication scholars on the effects of tCovid-19 on political communication. How governments, journalists, and the public communicate is of interest within the disciplines of political science, media studies, communication studies, and journalism.