Public Health Messaging during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: Lessons from Communication Science

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that effective public health messaging is an indispensable component of a robust pandemic response system. In this article, we review decades of research from the interdisciplinary field of communication science and provide evidence-based recommendations for COVID-19 public health messaging. We take a principled approach by systematically examining the communication process, focusing on decisions about what to say in a message (i.e., message content) and how to say it (i.e., message executions), and how these decisions impact message persuasiveness. Following a synthesis of each major line of literature, we discuss how science-based principles of message design can be used in COVID-19 public health messaging. Additionally, we identify emerging challenges for public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss possible remedies. We conclude that communication science offers promising public health messaging strategies for combatting COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Acknowledgments

We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by the authors are their own and the research presented in this paper should not be interpreted as representing the official viewpoint of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, or the National Cancer Institute.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.