An expert’s take on what the U.S., U.K did wrong in Covid-19 communications — and what others did right

What the U.S. did wrong on Covid-19 — and what others did right When it comes to public health communications and Covid-19, an expert sees clear differences between countries around the world. Rebecca Robbins STAT

Some governments have been praised for being forthright about being science-driven in the way they’ve communicated about the Covid-19 pandemic. Other countries, most notably the U.S. and the U.K., have been hit with criticism for public health messages that are confusing or not based in science.

Heidi Tworek, a health communications researcher and an associate professor of history and public policy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, joined STAT’s biotech podcast, “The Readout Loud,” this week, to talk about that issue. She and a team of researchers just put out a report examining the Covid-19 communications strategies of nine different nations: Senegal, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, and Canada.

This transcript of the conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

Heidi, among the governments that you looked at, which one has done the best job in communicating about Covid-19?

Oh, it’s a great question. I think if I had to pull out a couple that were best for very different reasons, I’d say Senegal, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and British Columbia. They all took extremely different approaches. But they followed some very basic principles that we lay out in the report, including simple things like having transparency, communicating about social values, and having very clear definitions of what they meant by success in combating Covid-19.

So, by contrast, the United States and the United Kingdom have received a lot of criticism for the way officials there have communicated with the public about the pandemic. What have they done wrong? ...

I think that was a sort of base-level problem [in the U.S. and U.K], a lack of transparency. Importantly, guidelines that are often orders that fluctuate surprisingly swiftly — we see that in the United Kingdom as well. Sometimes orders come down seven minutes before they’re about to be enforced and they’re so complicated that nobody really understands them. ...