Communicating Effectively with the Public During a Pandemic: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic and Preparation for Future Pandemics |Biomedgrid

Although the world has experienced similar pandemics in relatively recent years, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), the uncontrollable spread of COVID-19 demonstrated a seriously low level of preparation for a pandemic, regardless of the country. This indicates a very low level of risk awareness on pandemics in all sectors of society from individuals to organizations to the government. With the case of the United States, the unpreparedness and low risk perception to pandemics resulted in millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths, which keeps increasing even a half year after the COVID-19 pandemic became global in early 2020. No one can warrant when we can obtain effective vaccines or treatments for COVID-19. As experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the consequences of the unpreparedness to past, present, and future pandemics ultimately victimize the public who suffer physically and mentally from the diseases caused by COVID-19 and undergo a harsh financial difficulty due to losing jobs and medical costs for testing and treatments. In order to prevent such a chaotic global health disaster in the future, this article aims to critically investigate communication problems identified through the social experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and will pinpoint how we should communicatively prepare for unanticipated future pandemics.