Prior research provided great insights for crisis management, especially in the cases of accidental crises and preventable crises which are largely within the organization’s control. The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis in which corporates are likely to be perceived as victims. With weak crisis responsibility from the organization, we find that the managerial attention is shifted to increase corporate social responsibility (CSR) which is rarely discussed in the crisis management literature. The purpose of this study is to apply the stakeholder salience theory and explore the factors that contribute to corporate COVID-19 responses during the public health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Built upon the stakeholder salience framework, we propose and test the hypotheses that are derived from societal stakeholders’ power, legitimacy, and urgent claims during the pandemic by utilizing a sample of large public firms in the U.S. We reveal several corporate responses that address multiple stakeholders’ interests, including customers, shareholders, community, suppliers, and employees. Specifically, corporations with a larger number of employees, representing power, and larger social media followers, representing legitimacy, tend to adopt more corporate responses that address various stakeholders’ concerns. However, the extent of the COVID-19 impact on the industries, representing urgency, presents opposite effects of stakeholder salience on corporate responses. In the highly impacted industries, there is an increased influence of social media followers on the customer-related corporate responses; on the other hand, in the same highly impacted industries, there is a decreased influence of employees on the employee-related corporate responses.