During public health crises, the most important communications lie between health experts and the public. As Susan Channa discussed in her talk, a major pitfall of communication during the COVID-19 pandemic was that experts and organizations like the CDC failed to communicate information like number of cases and precautions early enough. As such, the public turned to either social media platforms or news sources for help. While some sources like the NYTimes COVID Tracker provided generally helpful and reliable data, other platforms spread misinformation. The communications of experts and organizations like the CDC are crucial to ensuring that false “truths” don not spread alongside illness. In the World Health Organization Bulletin, Rajiv N Rimal and Maria K Lapinski detail that there are three crucial considerations of health communications: first, that communications do not fall into a social vacuum; second, that messengers should expect discrepancies among the information disseminated by the source and received by the listener; and third, that the roles in communication are dynamic such that the source and receivers of information frequently switch positions. Given that pandemics introduce health crises to a large group of people, it is important to apply these considerations to health communications during HIV and COVID-19.

HIV

During the HIV pandemic, communications remained in a social vacuum and were not brought to the public until later into the crisis. In the beginning, most discussions around the virus occurred in LGBTQ+ spaces and among infectious disease specialists. However, through protests and campaigns, activists were able to bring the issue into the public sphere. As Ms. Thurman mentioned in her talk last week, these messengers were vital in bringing the discussion to the table. However, misinformation about HIV/AIDS was rampant, with individuals believing you could contract the virus from a toilet seat or even by touching an “infected” surface. These myths about HIV made public health communications even more difficult.

COVID-19

Similar to the HIV pandemic, we saw myths about the nature of COVID-19 enter into the public sphere. This time, however, social media was the main culprit. Instead of misinformation being spread face-to-face as seen for HIV, misinformed posts were shared screen-to-screen.To combat this, the CDC worked with platforms to create notifications that the information in the Tweet or post might not be “reliable” and that updates could be found on the CDC website. However, it may have been better if the information in each post could be reviewed and “debunked.” Working with communication scientists, computer programmers, and health experts, an algorithm or system could have been created to do this. For the future, health experts should collaborate more with communication scientists to track the spread of misinformation.