Background: Videos have been an important medium for providing health and risk communication to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials, health care professionals, and policy makers have used videos to communicate pandemic-related content to large parts of the population. Evidence regarding the outcomes of such communication, along with their determinants, is however limited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Science communication can provide people with more accurate information on pandemic health risks by translating complex scientific topics into language that helps people make more informed choices on how to protect themselves and others. During pandemics, experts in medicine, science, public health, and communication are important sources of knowledge for science communication. This study uses the COVID-19 pandemic to explore these experts' opinions and knowledge of what to communicate to the public during a pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A worldwide pandemic of a new and unknown virus is characterised by scientific uncertainty. However, despite this uncertainty, health authorities must still communicate complex health risk information to the public. The mental models approach to risk communication describes how people perceive and make decisions about complex risks, with the aim of identifying decision-relevant information that can be incorporated into risk communication interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The nonlinear nature of contagious diseases and the potential for exponential growth can be difficult to grasp for the general public. This has strong implications for public health communication, which needs to be both easily accessible and efficient. A pandemic is an extreme situation, and the accompanying strict societal measures are generally easier to accept if one understands the underlying reasoning behind them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The importance of effective communication during public health emergencies has been highlighted by the World Health Organization, and it has published guidelines for effective communication in such situations. With video being a popular medium, video communication has been a growing area of study over the past decades and is increasingly used across different sectors and disciplines, including health. Health-related video communication gained momentum during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and video was among the most frequently used modes of communication worldwide.
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