The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-2019) Outbreak: Amplification of Public Health Consequences by Media Exposure

By Dana Rose Garfin, R. Silver, E. Alison Holman. Health Psychology, 2020

1,067 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-2019) has led to a serious outbreak of often severe respiratory disease, which originated in China and has quickly become a global pandemic, with far-reaching consequences that are unprecedented in the modern era. As public health officials seek to contain the virus and mitigate the deleterious effects on worldwide population health, a related threat has emerged: global media exposure to the crisis. We review research suggesting that repeated media exposure to community crisis can lead to increased anxiety, heightened stress responses that can lead to downstream effects on health, and misplaced health-protective and help-seeking behaviors that can overburden health care facilities and tax available resources. We draw from work on previous public health crises (i.e., Ebola and H1N1 outbreaks) and other collective trauma (e.g., terrorist attacks) where media coverage of events had unintended consequences for those at relatively low risk for direct exposure, leading to potentially severe public health repercussions. We conclude with recommendations for individuals, researchers, and public health officials with respect to receiving and providing effective communications during a public health crisis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c2b81e3111927363d3e86bba40c3b4558223e33

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Citations in the corpus

Role of Social Media in Shaping Public Risk Perception during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Theoretical Review (2021, result): “Similar findings were done by Garfin et al. (2020) in terms of COVID-19.”
COVI White Paper (2020, result): “Given that most messaging relating to the Covid-19 crisis is overwhelmingly negative, care must be taken to reduce the stress imposed by messages framed in this way, particularly given that previous research has shown that message framing results can lead to significant shifts in public response [12”
Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: a call for action for mental health science (2020, background): “84 The immediate research priority is to better understand the role of repeated media consumption around COVID-19 in amplifying distress and mental ill-health in various groups, and the optimal patterns of consumption to promote wellbeing.”
Functional Fear Predicts Public Health Compliance in the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Indeed, increased and prolonged exposure to a community crisis, like the pandemic we are currently experiencing, has been found to result in increased maladaptive levels of anxiety leading to unnecessary behaviors associated with increased levels of impairments within individuals as well as overburd”
COVID-19 and the 24/7 News Cycle: Does COVID-19 News Exposure Affect Mental Health? (2020, background): “Exposure to macro-stressors, which is the case in this study’s focus on COVID-19, can be direct and indirect.”
Effects of COVID-19 Misinformation on Information Seeking, Avoidance, and Processing: A Multicountry Comparative Study (2020, background): “Because of the high uncertainty associated with the novelty of COVID-19, many people rely on online health information to learn more about how to protect themselves and their families from the imminent health threat (Bento et al., 2020; Garfin et al., 2020; Hernández-García & Giménez-Júlvez, 2020).”
COVID-19 information overload and generation Z's social media discontinuance intention during the pandemic lockdown (2021, positive): “, educational progress, financial security and the well-being of family members) caused by COVID-19 that appear on social media also aggravate Gen Z’s fear of the virus (Garfin et al., 2020; Randle et al., 2017).”