Tag: coronavirus

How journalists are handling news about the coronavirus outbreak

Posted on by Sarah Freeman

Editor’s note: this feature originally appeared on the UGA Today website. 

Journalists face some unique challenges when they try to report accurately on a major infectious disease outbreak like the one associated with COVID-19, according to professor Glen Nowak, director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at Grady College and a former director of media relations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including during the 2009 H1N1A influenza pandemic.

Below, Nowak provides his thoughts about the communication challenges facing journalists and the public when it comes to COVID-19 tests and testing.

Why has COVID-19 testing been in the news?

Diagnostic tests and testing are an essential part of an infectious disease outbreak response. After the first cases of new infectious disease have been identified, health care providers need to be able to quickly determine who else is infected, particularly other people who have similar symptoms, while public health officials need to quickly learn how many others have been infected, where infections and virus transmission are happening, and which people may be most likely to be infected and to have severe illness from their infections.

News media are interested in providing their audiences that information as quickly as possible. In the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., testing also made the news because there were problems with the initial test that CDC provided to state labs. This caused delays in being able to identify patients with COVID-19.

Much attention has been given to the importance of testing, including because some countries, such as South Korea, have been able to quickly and extensively test people to determine if they are infected with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and as a result, slow its spread.

Why will COVID-19 testing continue to be of news media and public interest?

COVID-19 tests and testing will continue to be in the news for at least three reasons. One, President Trump has said that a goal going forward is for anyone who wants to be tested to be able to do so. This means many news media will continue to be doing stories about the availability of COVID-19 tests at the local and state level. The supply of COVID-19 diagnostic tests is currently well short of the number needed to achieve this goal and supplies vary considerably across the country.

Two, there is disagreement about who needs to be tested and who should be tested. Hospitals and health care facilities that are dealing with large numbers of infected and potentially infected patients do not have the ability to test people with mild or no symptoms. As a result, we can expect news media stories about who can and cannot get tested.

Third, the information gained from diagnostic tests increases medical, science and public health knowledge regarding where this new coronavirus is, how many infections it is causing, the types of symptoms and range of illness people who are infected experience, and the percentage of people who experienced severe illness or died from their infection. That knowledge, in turn, is used to make decisions about how to slow and prevent the spread of the virus.

What are some of the communication challenges that COVID-19 tests and testing bring?

COVID-19 tests and testing bring many communication challenges. One challenge involves competing messages regarding who should be tested and how the tests should be used. While the CDC has issued and posted specific recommendations regarding who should be tested, decisions about testing are at the discretion of state and local health departments and individual clinicians. Some are testing people who do not have known exposures to the virus or who have mild symptoms, while others are limiting testing to people in risk groups or who have significant symptoms.

A second challenge is that there are different types of tests and different testing methods. There is not a single COVID-19 test. Most of the COVID-19 test and testing stories have focused on diagnostic tests – that is, tests used to determine if a person is currently infected. There are many companies providing these types of tests, with the time it takes to get results ranging from as short as 45 minutes to as long as a few days.

Less attention has been given to efforts involving the development and use of tests that can tell whether a person has been infected in the past with this new coronavirus. These are typically blood tests that look for antibodies that indicate if a person was infected. These tests are important because they help provide estimates of how many COVID-19 cases have gone undetected. This type of testing increases understanding of how many people had no symptoms or symptoms so mild that they were not noticed.

As this information becomes available, there is a good chance it will increase significantly increase the number of confirmed cases and lower fatality estimates. It is essential to accurately convey this information without creating the impression that the increase in confirmed cases involves new infections.

When it comes to COVID-19 tests and testing, what advice do you have for the news media?

As more COVID diagnostic tests become available and used, it is important that journalists, news media outlets, the public and policymakers understand that different types and uses of testing will be done going forward. They also need to understand the reasons for using and not using diagnostic tests, especially as tests become more widely available.

Finally, it will be helpful for journalists and policymakers to understand the difference between using tests to make medical diagnoses versus the use of testing to learn more about the extent and spread of the virus, the characteristics of the virus, and the effectiveness of measures intended to slow or prevent the spread of the virus. Doctors and medical facilities need tests that accurately and rapidly provide a diagnosis.

Those tests may not be designed or able to provide the more detailed information that comes from laboratory tests and analyses. It is also likely the case that as the CDC builds a surveillance system designed to obtain and provide much greater information about this new coronavirus that effort will involve much testing of people who do not have symptoms or known exposure to the virus. Testing people who appear to be healthy will be essential for getting a better picture of how widespread this virus is and the percentage of infections with no or very mild symptoms.

Related reading:

Health and Medical Journalism students report on coronavirus

Posted on by Sarah Freeman

When four Introduction to Health and Medical Journalism students sat around a table with several intensive care unit nurses, infection preventionists and public relations professionals at Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center on February 27, 2020, they were discussing the possibility of coronavirus coming to the area.

The discussion at the time was hypothetical.

Little did they know, a few weeks later they would be on the forefront of insight into local preparations for what many call the biggest story in recent time—and, they would see their class assignments published in Georgia Health News.

The students also learned first-hand what most professional journalists already know: the story journalists are assigned to cover can drastically change and be totally different by the time it is printed.

Sabriya Rice, the Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism, explains why it’s so important for student journalists to understand medical terms. “If you can’t fully explain the term,” Rice says, “you can’t explain it to your audience.” (photo: Sarah E. Freeman)

Madeline Laguaite, a graduate student in Grady’s health journalism master’s program, has experienced how quickly things have changed. The original story idea was evaluating the preparedness of Athens area hospitals if this novel coronavirus strain, now known as COVID-19, appeared in Athens.

“By the time it was ready to publish the week of March 15, the situation had changed,” Laguaite said. “COVID-19 cases in the U.S. were starting to pick up and it wasn’t really a question of if COVID-19 cases would appear in Athens, but when.”

Laguaite quickly learned another lesson of seasoned journalists: stories come on their own time, not the most convenient time. Although the story was turned before spring break, Laguaite spent most of that next week updating the story to make it accurate and relevant to what was happening at the time. She researched the decisions that local policymakers were making to protect the residents of Athens and talked with local restauranteurs about the economic impact of closing their restaurants.

“My motivation to continue updating and interviewing sources for the story came from my love of health reporting,” she continued. “Although the COVID-19 situation is uncertain and can be frightening, this is a great time to be getting a master’s in health and medical journalism.”

All four students in Sabriya Rice’s class are getting more experience than they expected when the class started in January. What started out as a typical master’s class for Laguaite, Jillian Tracy, Brittany Carter and Andrea (Andi) Clements, quickly diverged to an actual breaking news subject that the students could research, interview and report on in real time as they would if they were professional journalists.

To add to the experience, Rice arranged to have the final features reviewed and considered for print in Georgia Health News, which published the first two stories and is considering future features.

Sherry Ann Ward, director of patient and employee safety at St. Mary’s Hospital, shows Jillian Tracy the proper way to t wear an N95 mask on Feb. 12, 2020. (photo: Sabriya Rice)

As information about coronavirus started to intensify in China and Europe, the students started looking at local angles including a phone interview with a local resident who returned from international travel and had self-quarantined. They also visited and toured St. Mary’s and Piedmont Athens Regional hospitals. The students learned about negative pressure rooms, the correct way to put on an N-95 mask and how even taking out the trash and flushing the toilet have special procedures if there is a potentially infected patient.

“It definitely helps to get an idea for the atmosphere and a better visual understanding of the process,” said Tracy, a Double Dawg finishing her journalism degree and starting her master’s degree, about the impact of the tour. “Just getting thrown in is sometimes the best way to learn.”

The goal for Rice was to make sure her students were getting the experience, so they would not be intimidated when the time came for real reporting. The experience writing the stories and seeing them in print has been icing on the cake.

Despite the lack of down time over spring break, the class has been an eye-opening experience for Laguaite that has confirmed her interest in becoming a health reporter.

“This has definitely been a learning experience for sure,” Laguaite concluded. “With medical journalism, misinformation can be downright dangerous. We get new information about coronavirus every day and it really made me appreciate the work that health reporters do even more than I already do.”

Editor’s note: The visit to Piedmont Athens Regional took place February 27. The visit to St. Mary’s was on February 12. At the time of publication, the students had two stories published on the Georgia Health News website: “From a scare in Shanghai to a quarantine in Georgia” and “Quiet but not calm in a virus ghost town.”

Nowak discusses how news media face COVID-19 challenges

Posted on by Sarah Freeman

Editor’s note: this feature originally appeared on UGA Today.

Journalists face some unique challenges when they try to report accurately on a major infectious disease outbreak like the one associated with COVID-19, according to professor Glen Nowak, a former director of media relations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication in Grady College.

Below, Nowak shares his thoughts about COVID-19 communications and how journalists are handling news about the pandemic.

What are some of the challenges journalists face while covering an outbreak like this one?

Most laypeople, including journalists, have limited knowledge about infectious diseases, including how they spread or how long it can take before an infection causes symptoms. Unfortunately, many infectious diseases, particularly those that are new or new to us, bring much complexity and uncertainty. Infectious diseases often have incubation periods, cause initial symptoms that are not unique, and differ in how they are spread as well as how easily they are spread. This makes it difficult for journalists who are covering an outbreak to characterize the health threat, who is affected, and how things will unfold in the days and weeks ahead. Thanks to the complexity and uncertainty, it is often unclear to journalists, and in turn, the public, why public health actions and measures are or are not being taken by organizations like the CDC.

As the COVID-19 outbreak also illustrates, it can also be difficult for journalists to get access to the government experts and public health people for interviews. On one hand, journalists have many potential sources and places they can go for information, especially websites and university experts. On the other hand, they’re likely to have great difficulty getting access to the critical sources, such as the scientists working at CDC, the Food and Drug Administration or the National Institutes of Health.

How do journalists convey important information without sensationalizing or causing a panic?

First, it is important to recognize that it is the statements and actions taken by public health and government agencies that is usually the primary source of people’s concerns, questions, and worry. Second, panic is an extremely rare outcome in the truest sense of the term, which is taking irrational actions that have no value or purpose. With respect to the media, they have to balance using words, phrases, and images that convey the seriousness of the situation with those that primarily seek to grab attention. They also have to decide how they are going to portray information from official sources so that it conveys an appropriate and useful tone and frame. With COVID-19 updates and information, at this point the goal is to foster the right level of worry and concern, including so that people’s actions are helpful.

When you look at the wide range of responses that people have to media stories, it’s important to remember that those news stories on the actions being taken, recommended or considered primarily exist because journalists are covering the COVID-19 developments. COVID-19 is getting much media attention because government agencies and others are holding press conferences and media interviews to issue updates, warnings and recommendations. I think sometimes we focus too much on the news media when it comes to being satisfied or dissatisfied with the volume or visibility of information, and fail to recognize government agencies and other organizations are using and relying on news media to convey messages broadly and urge widespread actions.

Do you think news media has done a good job reporting on this issue so far?

I’ve been impressed for the most part. Not only are major and local news media outlets covering the story, many are also producing and promoting very helpful and easy-to-understand COVID-19 resources that are updated regularly and that are linked to CDC and other official sources. These include local actions as well as answers to frequently asked COVID-19 questions. As a result, it is easy for people who want more information to find and get it from a variety of places. Most news media have also taken down paywalls to make it possible to access the latest COVID-19 news for free.