Communicating COVID-19

“An invaluable document of COVID-19’s media life, which offers a richly nuanced examination of COVID-19 news journalism, public facing health sector communications and social media.  Communicating COVID-19 is a touchstone for the emerging field of pandemic media.”

- Mark D M Davis, Monash University, Australia, co-author of Pandemics, Publics and Narrative (2020)

“As governments and scientists scrambled to find solutions in the face of grave uncertainty created by COVID-19, there was a massive public demand for information. Filling this communication gap is the focus of this must-read, timely book, which includes excellent scholarly contributions from across the globe.”

- Quarraisha Abdool Karim, Professor in Clinical Epidemiology, Columbia University, USA, and Associate Scientific Director at CAPRISA

​This book explores communication during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring the work of leading communication scholars from around the world, it offers insights and analyses into how individuals, organisations, communities, and nations have grappled with understanding and responding to the pandemic that has rocked the world. The book examines the role of journalists and news media in constructing meanings about the pandemic, with chapters focusing on public interest journalism, health workers and imagined audiences in COVID-19 news. It considers public health responses in different countries, with chapters examining community-driven approaches, communication strategies of governments and political leaders, public health advocacy, and pandemic inequalities. The role of digital media and technology is also unravelled, including social media sharing of misinformation and memetic humour, crowdsourcing initiatives, the use of data in modelling, tracking and tracing, and strategies for managing uncertainties created in a pandemic.