Ida Jooste is an award-winning journalist and a media technical expert at Internews. Ida is working on the post-Ebola response in West Africa and helping the media of Sub-Saharan African countries create an enabling environment for HIV biomedical prevention research to thrive.
“Evolving science gives rise to evolving guidance.”
Communicate to explain
Humans invented language. With a new coronavirus out there, I think we can think of new ways to communicate and not be stuck in a war metaphor. We can think of ways to be more empathetic so that our language is not stigmatizing. As we get to know this virus as science journalists, we tend to get clever. We know about R0. We know exactly what flattening the curve means. We’re following clinical trials. So, we tend to sometimes get ahead of ourselves as journalists and forget that we spend a lot of time researching all of this online speaking or listening to scientists.
Our general audience, on the other hand, just wants to know what it means for them.
What about that language? What about the science that is useful for them?
I don’t think that a lot of the things we have to say as journalists and as people to one another about this new virus are words that we may still come up within time. Just as science is evolving, our language is evolving.
The New England Journal of Medicine produced a fascinating article. It says that literally speaking, with a little bit of saliva, the droplets that we produce when we speak, especially when we say words, like that and catch and thank you, those th- words, we can put people around us at risk. That’s of course the literal meaning. We can also put people at risk in the way we speak through the language we use. Through the words, we use in the writing.
Why do we not stick with war metaphors?
We’ve heard a prominent president describing himself as a wartime president. We’ve heard about battling the virus. We hear about immune defense systems. Those typical metaphors that are usually used about the soldiers in our bodies that fight the virus, that fight any pathogen. I would want to be led by someone informed and led by science and also very empathetic. A wartime president need not be that.
We talk about battling the virus. But maybe the person living with the virus is at the receiving end of unnecessary attention. Maybe the person is coping.
The world of HIV and AIDS has for decades published lists (table below). This tells us you about the stigmatizing and sometimes scientifically inaccurate terminology that people tend to go to before they sit back and think. I’m suggesting, perhaps, we can do the same for the new coronavirus. For COVID-19, think of all the stigmatizing or the unnecessary conflicting conflict-laden language and think of a new way to describe things.
Science babble – Flattening the curve
We all have seen flattening the curve. We also have to acknowledge that all of us as journalists get exposed to it. We’ve heard presentations where it’s being described. We all probably had mathematics or statistics as a subject at school. But at the same time when you see it visually, you can already begin to understand what it means only if you’ve actually been exposed to graphs like that. Even if you’ve been exposed to graphs like that, and you don’t have the luxury of seeing it visually, for instance on the radio then, what does flatten the curve mean then.
Once we are clear about what exponential growth is, we need to transmit that to our audiences.
- When we flatten the curve, we slow down the rate of infection so that health systems don’t get overwhelmed. We buy time to be able to respond.
- When we talk about social distancing, it sounds clinical. It doesn’t sound like the way that humans interact. We, perhaps, should just say don’t get too close to the people around you.
- When we talk about exponential growth, we can just say there’s a very rapid rise in infection, and then it continues to grow even more rapidly.
Do no harm – First rule of reporting
We’ve all noticed this incredible explosion once again of anti-Chinese sentiments. We know why WHO decided to not name a virus after its place of origin. Again, we should name it for its technical and scientific name. We should say new coronavirus (it’s not the first coronavirus overall). So, we are communicating something in science but we are not doing harm to the people of Wuhan. We’re not further increasing those anti-Chinese sentiments that are unfortunately on the rise again.
We talk about imported cases. It makes a person sound like a commodity, like a piece of shampoo or something that was imported from another country.
The word index case. It’s as if we think we know who the first person with the infection had been when we all know that pyramid that shows how many people usually either have no symptoms or very mild symptoms. Who may be infected and don’t get tested where do they fit into?
From the world of HIV, we also have all rapidly embraced this idea of not talking about only people who are infected but to acknowledge that truly all of us in the world are affected by this virus.
The way that we do no harm is to not do any other-ing. We always hear about ‘they’, ‘the patient’s’, ‘them’, ‘how to treat them’, ‘how to handle it’ – when it’s actually all of us. It’s not only because the entire world is affected, but also because all of us could be infected. We could have had a mild infection and have never been tested.
An opportunity to communicate, to educate
I am reminded of a quote by Susan Sontag who said that many times when we use these metaphors ‘in the middle of a calamity’, ‘a perfect storm’, we also are disenfranchising people who are perhaps ready for this uncertainty. If we say that COVID19 is the perfect storm, we actually deny the science that has come before it. We deny the fact that it has been known that a pathogen like this might emerge. We make ourselves people helpless as if we didn’t play a part in it and top scientists didn’t expect that this would be happening. At that moment there is an opportunity for us to educate in a very adult and mature way.
Another way to address that is to actually say that science is evolving. We could use some of those examples like, for instance, the guidance around masks has changed. Some people question the guidance of the WHO. We must remember that evolving science gives rise to evolving guidance. So, that could be a way of using it as a moment for science education which could be empowering.
Concluding remarks:
I’ll say new-not new. It’s a novel coronavirus but some aspects of it are not new. There have been coronaviruses before. There are things that science is still discovering. There have been coronaviruses before for which health solutions have been found and in time.
Read Part 1 and Part 3 for perspectives from other panelists.
Watch the complete webinar on YouTube here.