Abstract
The outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic that purpoted to originate in the city of Wuhan draws a lot of questions on the extent of crisis health communication concerning the international media. At the inception stage, in January 2020, it was reported that about ten major cities in China had been affected by this virus at that time labelled as 2019 nCov. By March 10, 2020, the disease had spread to Europe, the UK, Middle-East, and Africa, with more than 114,344 confirmed cases reported globally. In this situation, various scholars have often criticized the media for framing, misinformation, or exaggeration in the news information. In contrast, others have hailed the media for playing an educative and informative role to the public. Utilizing content analysis, framing and consecutive day sampling, this study focused on examining the media coverage of the initial two months of the COVID-19 Pandemic by four international news media organizations namely; BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera and the People’s Daily. The article contributes to the discourse of mass media practice, and application of various research paradigm in deconstructing media framing during critical periods.
Highlights
January 9, 2020, marked the first fatality case to the coronavirus outbreak that affected the People’s Republic of China, with initial reports indicating that the virus to have originated from a seafood market in Wuhan city (Huang et al, 2020)
According to Huang et al (2020), the initial response of the local health authorities in the region was the closure of the seafood market on the first day January 2020; at the time, there were 59 patients admitted in hospital with pneumonia-like symptoms sharing an exposure history of their presence at the seafood market
Scientists working on the early stages of the disease confirmed it to be coronavirus with high levels of fatality registered in the first cases (Huang et al, 2020)
Summary
January 9, 2020, marked the first fatality case to the coronavirus outbreak that affected the People’s Republic of China, with initial reports indicating that the virus to have originated from a seafood market in Wuhan city (Huang et al, 2020). The disease outbreak showed, some similar characteristics to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) infections. These diseases proved to be fatal, with very high mortality rates (Assiri et al, 2013)
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