Coronavirus a year later: two countries that did it right and three that did it badly

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared that the Covid-19 public health emergency had become a pandemic: 114 countries were affected, there were 121,500 confirmed cases and more than 4,000 people had succumbed to the virus.

A year later, we have now seen 115 million confirmed cases worldwide and over 2.5 million deaths from Covid-19.

“Pandemic is not a word to be used lightly or recklessly,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on that day in 2020. But in the year since that announcement, the fate of many countries depended on how the leaders chose their words.

The impact of the pandemic has been unprecedented and all governments have faced challenges in the face of a serious but highly unpredictable threat to the lives of their citizens. And some governments have responded better than others.

My colleagues and I recently conducted a comparative study on how 27 countries responded to the emergence of the virus and the first wave, and how they communicated that response to their citizens.

We invited national experts to analyze their government’s communication style, the flow of information about the coronavirus and the actions of civil society, mapping these responses to the number of cases and deaths in the country in question. .

Our work reveals contrasting responses that reflect a nation’s internal politics, suggesting that a government’s handling of the pandemic was rooted in existing leadership models.

With the news of the spread of Covid-19 crossing international borders, national preventive measures had to be explained carefully.

The WHO has proven to be ill-equipped, has provided equivocal and imperfect advice regarding international travel, even from Hubei province, and has questioned the effectiveness of wearing masks.

How individual leaders communicated with their citizens about the risks they faced depended a lot.

Crisis management experts and social psychologists stress the importance of clarity and empathy in communication during a health emergency.

So who did well and who missed the mark?

South Korea and Ghana

We have found two major examples of this style of communication that works well in practice.

South Korea avoided a lockdown by clearly communicating the threat of Covid-19 as early as January, encouraging the wearing of masks (which were previously common in the country in response to an earlier Sars outbreak) and quickly deploying a search app for contacts.

Each change in the official alert level, along with new advice regarding social contact, was carefully communicated by Jung Eun-Kyung, the head of the country’s Center for Disease Control, who used the changes in her own life to demonstrate how the new directions should work in practice. .

The transparency of this approach was echoed in the communication style of the Ghanaian President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Akufo-Addo took responsibility for the coronavirus policy and carefully explained each action required, being honest about the challenges the nation faced.

Simple displays of empathy have earned him acclaim in his country and around the world.

“We know how to bring the economy back to life. What we don’t know is how to bring people back to life, ”he said.

Brazil, UK and India

South Korea and Ghana adopted a consistent tone emphasizing the risks of the new pandemic and how they could be mitigated.

Countries that performed less well encouraged complacency and disseminated inconsistent messages about the threat of Covid-19.

In March 2020, just three weeks before placing the country on lockdown and catching Covid-19 himself, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson played down the threat and said he had shaken hands with those infected, against the recommendations of its expert advisers.

Today, the UK has one of the highest per capita death rates from Covid-19 in the world.

Avoiding a full initial lockdown, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro – who also contracted Covid-19 – called for the maintenance of normalcy, challenging expert advice and polarizing opinion along partisan lines.

Such practices have led Brazilians to distrust official information and spread disinformation, while compliance with containment measures has become an ideological rather than a public health issue.

Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an instant lockdown with just four hours’ notice, which sparked an internal migration crisis, with working poor people leaving cities to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to to their rural homes.

Naturally, the workers have prioritized their fears of homelessness and famine over the risk of the spread of Covid-19 across the country.

None of the above actually took into account the impact the coronavirus would have on society, or that credibility is gained through consistency.

The poor results in each case partially reflect these leadership errors.

Bad luck or bad judgment?

Of course, the course of the pandemic was not just due to good or bad communication from leaders.

Health systems and demographics may also have played a role, and the countries most affected not only have strategic weaknesses, but are also global transport hubs and popular destinations – London, New York, Paris, etc.

In hindsight, closing the borders would have been wise, despite the advice of the World Health Organization.

Yet it is evident that leaders who adopted clear, early, expert-led, consistent, and empathetic advice have fared well in terms of public reputation and have been able to mitigate the worst effects of the virus.

On the flip side, those who have politicized the virus, shown unqualified optimism, or made last-minute decisions have overseen some of the nations with the most cases and deaths.