Carleton’s Josh Greenberg on Risk Communication During COVID-19

One of the certainties of the COVID-19 public health crisis is just how inconsistent public health messaging has been over the last few weeks.

While the virus ripped through China and Europe before arriving in North America, government agencies insisted that the risk to Canadians remained low. Some politicians encouraged families to take March break trips. Within days, others notified them to return as soon as possible or risk being stuck overseas.

Those with the illness or who travelled internationally were asked to self-isolate voluntarily. Some jurisdictions are imposing fines if they leave their houses while others are having trouble explaining what self isolation means.

Prof. Josh Greenberg

As an expert on crisis and health risk communication, Josh Greenberg of Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication says these mixed messages are confusing and reverberating within communities where they create second-order challenges for public health officials. Once an initial frame takes hold, risk communication research has found it’s really hard to shift people’s thinking.

“The message from our top medical experts and officials, from early January until as recently as the end of the first week in March, is that while this was something we shouldn’t ignore, the risk was not serious,” says Greenberg.

“Let’s remember, we are dealing with a novel virus that we don’t know very much about. And because people struggle to make sense of risks that are unknown, they look for ways to make them feel more familiar. Enter all the news stories, blog posts, hot takes and social media memes comparing COVID-19 to commonly understandable health risks like influenza.”

Greenberg says that the “initial framing” of the disease as a low risk was technically accurate at the time but may have established a sense of complacency that underprepared us for dealing with the velocity of its arrival.

“The speed with which we have now shifted gears helps to explain why we still see parks and playgrounds packed with people, lineups for new video game releases in downtown Toronto, and people going to shopping malls despite advice to stay away from those areas and to avoid non-essential business,” says Greenberg, who is himself isolated due to recent international travel.

“I expect this level of complacency will change once hospitalization numbers increase, as we start to see more cases involving Canadians who are dying of this illness, and as the pressures on our healthcare system become too visible to ignore. Ideally we need to avoid getting to that point, but it seems as though the die has been cast and we are in for a very difficult period ahead.”