By Yan Dengfeng
Containing a pandemic depends on many factors: the nature of the contagion, the availability of medical resources, and how quickly a vaccine can be developed. But the public’s awareness of the health risk and their willingness to take preventive measures are always crucial, and these are shaped by the effectiveness and persuasiveness of public communication about health risks.
There is no dispute that the best way to limit COVID-19’s spread is for individuals to stay at home as much as possible, wear a mask in public, wash hands, and practice social distancing. Compliance with these precautionary behaviors has, however, been dramatically uneven. At least some of this unevenness can be attributed to the relative strength or weakness of health communication, which shapes the public’s perception of risk and their subsequent willingness to take preventive measures.
Linking the virus to a single location, for instance, can have negative public health consequences. Associating coronavirus with cities, like Wuhan and New York, no doubt led many people outside those areas to underestimate their infection risk.
A study by Arul and Himanshu Mishra found that when selecting a hypothetical home site, study participants were more likely to select a site in a state where no earthquake was reported, even though home sites in both states were equidistant from an earthquake’s epicenter. Participants simply perceived out-of-state locations to be safer.
This implies that, when assessing risk, people often disregard relevant factors like actual distance, instead of basing decisions on unrelated factors like political boundaries. Similarly, when Italy became an early epicenter of the coronavirus, people in many European countries mistakenly believed they were safe. As a result, many governmental agencies and hospitals were underprepared. Health communicators must therefore do more to inform people that physical distance is a better risk indicator than political boundaries.
The media and policymakers must also consider public data literacy when communicating risk information. Take, for example, the United States’ report of more than 77,000 positive coronavirus cases on one day, July 16, 2020. Few people can make sense of this number without good context. The July 16th report exceeded the previous single-day reported case record by nearly 10,000, representing a significant uptick in the speed of the virus’s spread. But in many cases, media reports failed to make this connection, instead highlighting the 3.5 million total confirmed cases in the United States at the time, thus overshadowing the infection rate spike. Consider efforts to communicate the risk of smoking, which often cite the number of people who die from smoking every day or every year.
Even though the “every day” and “every year” versions communicate the exact same information, researchers Sucharita Chandran and Geeta Menon found that study participants who viewed health data with the “every day” framing perceived greater risk and showed greater concern about behaviors that increased their risk.
Thus, to help the public perceive health risks more accurately, health communicators must put key numbers into perspective. These examples illustrate that efforts to contain the pandemic will only be effective if health communicators frame the information in ways that consider and account for the public’s data literacy and risk assessment.