2019 Novel Coronavirus
(a.k.a. Wuhan Coronavirus)
Relevant Articles on this Website
As I write this in early February 2020, the novel coronavirus that started spreading from Wuhan, China in late 2019 looks likely to become a pandemic of unknown severity.
My wife and colleague Jody Lanard and I are coming out of near-total retirement to do a little writing about Wuhan coronavirus risk communication. Everything on this website that’s explicitly about the current pandemic-to-be is here.
You might also want to check out Jody’s Twitter feed @EIDGeek for her tweets about the coronavirus.
But virtually all the risk communication issues are familiar, and we have dealt with them before in more detail. Our writing on the swine flu pandemic of 2009–2010 is especially relevant, particularly from the early days when it looked like it might be severe. (It wasn’t.) There are also lessons worth harvesting from bird flu, Ebola, and SARS, and some that aren’t about any specific pandemic.
Some of the articles listed below will become more or less relevant as it becomes clearer how widespread the Wuhan coronavirus is and how much severe disease it causes. The “blurb” describing each article was written when that article was first posted (except for the two Guestbook entries, which had no blurbs). These blurbs don’t necessarily reflect how the epidemics or pandemics they address turned out – but they should give you a pretty good sense of which articles are likely to be most relevant to what you are facing with the Wuhan coronavirus.
If you want more, browse through the website’s Pandemic Flu and Other Infectious Diseases Index.
REMINDER:
Website articles explicitly on Wuhan coronavirus risk communication.
Jody Lanard’s Twitter feed on Wuhan coronavirus risk communication.
Website articles about past emerging infectious diseases that seem especially relevant now are listed below.
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Containment as Signal: Swine Flu Risk Miscommunication
Posted: June 29, 2009
The swine flu pandemic started in North America, and by the time the virus was identified it was already widely seeded in the U.S. So the experts judged that it was too late to try to “contain” its U.S. spread; from Day One, the U.S. was focused mostly on coping with the disease, not stopping or even slowing it. Outside North America, on the other hand, an initial containment strategy made public health sense. But containment isn’t just a public health strategy. It is also a risk communication signal of enormous importance. Containment sends a signal that the pandemic can be contained and that it must be contained – that it is stoppable and severe. Instead of countering these misleading signals, the governments of many countries have issued misleading messages to match. This is doing significant damage to the world’s preparedness to cope with the unstoppable (and soon to be pervasive) but so far mild pandemic that is just beginning.
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“Fear Is Spreading Faster than SARS” — And So It Should!
Posted: April 28, 2003
Until it turned out less contagious than initially thought, SARS looked to many experts like it might very well be the devastating pandemic they had spent decades fearfully awaiting. When Jody Lanard and I wrote this column in April 2003, that was still an open question. The public’s SARS fears were entirely justifiable – yet many governments, experts, and even journalists were working overtime to dampen those fears. The column describes this “soft cover-up” of SARS over-optimism, tries to explain why so many officials were seduced by it, and offers both good examples of guiding the public’s fear and bad examples of trying to allay that fear. The column concludes with a list of 18 specific risk communication recommendations for talking about SARS.
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Pre-Crisis Communication: Talking about What-Ifs
Posted: September 13, 2013
This column is devoted not to crisis communication but to pre-crisis communication: how to talk to people about a possible future emergency. In building the case for communicating before you absolutely have to, the column examines four principal responses to pre-crisis communication: (1) People who were worried already are usually relieved that the issue is on the table. (2) People who have too many other things to worry about are usually apathetic and hard to reach. (2) People who were already too worried to bear it are usually in denial and hard to reach in a completely different way. (4) People who are hearing the scary news for the first time usually go through an adjustment reaction, a temporary and useful overreaction.
If the crisis is actually coming, the column argues, pre-crisis communication has considerable upside and no downside. The column ends with recommendations for minimizing the downside of warning about a possible crisis that fizzles. -
What to Say When a Pandemic Looks Imminent: Messaging for WHO Phases Four and Five
Posted: March 15, 2007
If and when a serious pandemic arrives, messaging will shift from precaution advocacy (high-hazard, low-outrage) to crisis communication (high-hazard, high-outrage). There will be a transition period between the two, when the pandemic looks imminent and outrage is rising fast. This very long column – split into four parts – identifies 25 “standby messages” for that transition period. It elaborates both the messages and their risk communication rationales. Jody Lanard and I wrote the column with two goals in mind: to help officials prepare their communications for the early days of a pandemic that looks like it might be severe, and to help them decide to be more candid (and thus more alarming) in their pre-pandemic communications now in order to make those early days less of a shock.
A French translation of the 25 messages, originally posted on the website Zone Grippe Aviaire (which has disappeared), is now available on this site.
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Superb Flu Pandemic Risk Communication: A Role Model from Australia
Posted: July 6, 2005
On May 2, 2005, Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott gave a speech on pandemic preparedness. It wasn’t especially earthshaking; in fact, it attracted fairly little media attention. But Jody Lanard and I thought it was terrific – candid, alarming, tentative, all the things most official pandemic presentations were not (and are not). So we sat down to annotate the speech in terms of 25 crisis communication recommendations we had published previously. If you just read the speech, you’ll discover that good risk communication can sound just as ordinary as bad risk communication. If you read the column’s annotations, you’ll discover how extraordinary this particular speech really was.
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Posted: October 11, 2014
This Guestbook response tries to distinguish among hard racism, soft racism, stigma, and caution as possible reasons why people might avoid contact with others somehow associated with Ebola. After briefly addressing hard and soft racism, the response focuses mostly on the all-important distinction between stigma and caution – and the ways people’s caution about Ebola or any infectious disease (and especially an unfamiliar one) can lead to behavior that is misinterpreted as stigma. The other major focus of the article is how to respond to actual stigma – especially the dangers of stigmatizing stigma instead of discouraging it empathically.
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Posted: April 29, 2009
This was my first substantial piece of writing about swine flu. I have resisted the temptation to update the description that follows. When I started criticizing the government for talking about swine flu as if there were nothing for the public to do but watch and practice good hygiene, we were at WHO Pandemic Phase 3. When I started this column (this morning) we were at Phase 4. When I finished the column (this evening), it was already Phase 5. The focus of this column is why the U.S. government is reluctant to urge the public to prepare now for a possibly imminent pandemic, and why I think the government should overcome its reluctance and do it! If you’re skeptical about advising people to imagine The Big One, get used to that knot in their stomachs, and then get started on preparedness, read this column. If you’re not skeptical and want to know what I think the important messages for right now are, skip this column and instead read “What to Say When a Pandemic Looks Imminent: Messaging for WHO Phases Four and Five.”
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Swine flu worst case scenarios: warn people now or wait till things start getting nasty?
Posted: May 30, 2009
Dan Rutz, a communication professional at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote to challenge my view that the CDC (and other authorities) should do more to help people imagine what a severe pandemic might be like, and to motivate people to prepare for the possibility that one might be coming.
He argued that warning about worst case scenarios right now, when swine flu has turned out mild so far, is both unkind and futile. Worse, it is likely to squander credibility that will be needed if a severe pandemic does start to look imminent. I responded, and Dan annotated my response.
The result is a dialogue that makes both viewpoints clear. Dan also proposed a compromise: Include worst case scenarios as one of the uncertainties mentioned, but without undue emphasis. And “give people permission to stockpile food, etc., but don’t push it on everyone; that way, we’re respecting those who choose to be cautious, but not antagonizing those who decide to wait it out a bit longer.” -
Distributed by Project Syndicate, July 27, 2009
Project Syndicate asked me to do one on how public health officials ought to be communicating with the public about the ongoing H1N1 pandemic. The resulting piece briefly discusses nine mistakes officials should stop making: don’t feign confidence; don’t over-reassure; don’t worry about panic; don’t obsess over accusations of fear-mongering; don’t fight the adjustment reaction; don’t oversell what the government is doing; don’t oversell what the public can do; don’t ask the impossible; and don’t neglect the teachable moment.
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Dilemmas in Emergency Communication Policy
Article by Peter M. Sandman (Link is to a PDF file: 178 kB
) In Emergency Risk Communication CDCynergy (CD-ROM), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, February 2003
This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC’s CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. Based partly on my earlier Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action, this one deals with ten “dilemmas” facing emergency communication planners:
- Candor versus secrecy
- Speculation versus refusal to speculate
- Tentativeness versus confidence
- Being alarming versus being reassuring
- Being human versus being professional
- Being apologetic versus being defensive
- Decentralization versus centralization
- Democracy and individual control versus expert decision-making
- Planning for denial and misery versus planning for panic
- Erring on the side of caution versus taking chances
For each of the ten dilemmas, my own position leans toward the first of the two poles – and the natural instinct of communicators in mid-emergency leans toward the second.
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Adjustment Reactions: The Teachable Moment in Crisis Communication
Posted: January 17, 2005
When people first learn about a new risk, they go through a temporary over-reaction that is natural, healthy, and useful. Psychiatrists call this the “adjustment reaction.” Having one is virtually a prerequisite to crisis preparedness. This short column outlines the characteristics of adjustment reactions. It advises crisis communicators to guide the public through its pre-crisis or early-crisis adjustment reaction, rather than trying to persuade people to skip this essential step toward being ready to cope.
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Obvious or Suspected, Here or Elsewhere, Now or Then: Paradigms of Emergency Events
Article by Peter M. Sandman (Link is to a PDF file: 117 kB
)Published in Emergency Risk Communication CDCynergy (CD-ROM), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, February 2003
This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC’s CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. The usual paradigm for emergency communication is the obviously horrific event that is happening right here, right now. This article focuses on communication strategies to address six other paradigms:
- Obvious/here/future
- Obvious/here/past
- Obvious/elsewhere/now
- Suspected/here/now
- Suspected/here/future
- Suspected/here/past
Selected handouts from our crisis communication training course
(Note: Each link is to a PDF file larger than 10 kB and smaller than 40 kB.
- Crisis communication I: How bad is it? How sure are you? )
- Crisis communication II: Coping with the emotional side of the crisis )
- Crisis communication III: Involving the public )
- Crisis communication IV: Errors, misimpressions and half-truths )
