Health Communication Strategies: Crisis Management and Infodemic During COVID-19

Introduction

Health communication is defined as the art and technique of informing, influencing, and motivating people about important health problems at individual, institutional and social levels (İmik Tanyıldızı, 2020; Avcı & Avşar, 2014). According to another definition, health communication means “the study and use of communication strategies to inform and influence individual and community decisions that enhance health” (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control [ECDC], 2008). Working in cooperation with disciplines such as communication, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and business (Çınarlı 2008), health communication deals with issues such as medical decision making, health literacy, patient-centered communication, and risk communication (Oh et al., 2013).

The main objectives of health communication include (a) informing the public about diseases and health problems, (b) raising their awareness, (c) preventing diseases, (c) improving health and quality of life at both the individual and community level (Mahmud et al., 2013; Mendi, 2015; Redmond et al., 2010), (d) managing the communication processes among health workers, managers, and patients, (e) ensuring that the public perceives the information given by the health institutions correctly, (f) determining different understandings and beliefs in different cultures regarding health and illness and correcting misunderstandings if there are (Mendi, 2015), (g) creating health campaigns and messages to change behaviour and (h) preparing and implementing the risk communication strategies (ECDC, 2008). To manage these objectives a proper health communication process must be prepared. For this, the messages must be trustable, accessible, and understandable by everyone (Öztürk & Öymen, 2013; Bernhardt, 2004). With the technological advancements in communication, social media is more likely to be used in health communication. Although it offers many advantages such as speed, synchrony, participation, interaction, timelessness, and spacelessness, it also poses a serious disadvantage which is the rapid spread of misinformation or disinformation. To eliminate this disadvantage, the authorities should warn the public against mis/disinformation regularly and raise public awareness about the spread and transmission patterns of the related diseases.

When a new disease spreads worldwide it is called a pandemic (World Health Organisation [WHO], 2010). It has been declared a pandemic many times throughout the history of human civilization. The best known of these include plague (also called as black death), cholera, influenza, H1N1, polio, Zika, and Ebola (Baygül Özpınar & Aydın, 2020; İmik Tanyıldızı, 2020; Chakraborty & Maity, 2020). Today the world is facing a new pandemic threat, called coronavirus. Coronaviruses, namely SARS, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2, belong to a large diverse family of viruses. The word COVID-19 (the more common name for SARS-CoV-2) was created by combining the abbreviations of the words “corona” (CO), “virus” (VI), and “disease” (D) plus the year of its outbreak (2019) (Chakraborty & Maity, 2020). The first case of the outbreak of COVID-19 was reported in Wuhan, China on December 31, 2019 (Pulido et al., 2020) and within almost three months it spread globally thus on March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak the pandemic COVID-19 (WHO, 2020a).