Public health communication and the Covid-19: A review of the literature during the first wave

Abstract

The expansion of the Covid-19 virus in early 2020 grew in parallel with the spread of rumours, false or unverified news and even contradictions between information sources and health sources. It has been the first pandemic to be broadcast live on social media and has generated disinformation which was described by the WHO as an “infodemic”, a pandemic as serious as the virus itself. The aim was to identify and analyse the impact generated by the first wave of Covid-19 (January-June 2020) on public health communication. The review was carried out under the Prisma guidelines. A systematic search was performed in PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science databases, which yielded a figure of 1.157 papers. Using seven keywords as a filter a corpus of 193 articles was reached. Four main themes were identified: 1) Need for massive public health literacy; 2) Social networks as an information and disinformation during pandemic; (3) The uncertain response of institutional communication; and (4) Media coverage of the pandemic. The authors propose large-scale health literacy and point out the need to work on health information together -governments, health institutions and the media-.