Communicating the Pandemic (Part 1)

I still remember the chill I felt watching Dr. Demetre Daskalakis in that video. “It’s already here,” he was saying, like the scientist in a sci-fi film warning that the alien invasion was underway.

It was the 10th of March, 2020. The Novel Coronavirus had been spreading since some time late the year before, first in China and, by then, in Italy. Yet here in New York City, where both Dr. Daskalakis and I lived and worked, life had been continuing pretty much as always. Social distancing was still something the privileged set did to keep their distance from the rest of us.

I have been a journalist my whole life. I get paid to try to understand what’s going on, so I can share this with the community. Yet nothing I had heard from our government leaders or seen in the media had prepared me for the sense of imminent peril Dr. Daskalakis was describing.

It was not just that he knew things I did not know, like the rising number of cases with “flu-like symptoms” that were not explained by positive flu tests. “There is something causing illness in New York City and it’s not the flu,” he explained.

By definition, journalists usually know less than those we cover. When we do our job well, we can sometimes connect the dots in a way that gives a better overall picture of the situation. Let’s just say that COVID-19, at least in its early, crucial, phases, was not one of those situations.

What was jarring watching that video was not that I learned things I did not know. What was shocking, even scary, was the sense of urgency Dr. Daskalkais was communicating, something I was not getting anywhere else at that moment—not from the Mayor, nor the Governor nor, certainly, the President of the United States. And not from my colleagues in journalism, many of them very able and well informed in issues of science and public health.

All of this was particularly confounding because Dr. Daskalakis worked for the Mayor of New York. He was Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control at New York City’s legendary Department of Public Health.

But his urgent warnings were not going out to the general public that day. No, he was sounding the alarm at a meeting with doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital. I learned about this, as reporters do, when I asked a source at the hospital what kind of preparations were underway for the possibility COVID-19 would arrive here. Her answer was to urge me to go find this video of Dr. Daskalakis on YouTube.

As reporters, we love these kinds of “scoops.” Finding something important that no one else knows about and getting it out ahead of anyone else, all of which I then did. But as a citizen, which I am too, it was the moment that I began to understand that something was catastrophically wrong with the way we were communicating about this pandemic.

A virus as dangerous as any we had experienced in 100 years was already circulating beyond prevention in the nation’s largest city, my city, and I was learning this because a source told me to go watch a YouTube video!!!

As this fifth anniversary focuses us on how we do better next time, a very important piece is preparing reliable channels of communication that distribute more accurate information more quickly. This is a task that—to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau’s famous injunction that war is too important to be left to the general—is too important to be left just to political leaders and their public health officers.

News media should be included in the planning, and we must accept our responsibility to be better prepared next time. For all our self-congratulations (Pulitzers and other prizes), we in the media did a poor job of alerting the public to the seriousness of this pandemic, particularly in that early stage.

News in a Democratic Society

It is useful to pause here for a moment to review the role of news in a democratic society. In this age of rampant disinformation, we focus a great deal on the role of journalism in providing vetted, reliable information. This is vital. But it is only half the story.

The rest of the story, as broadcaster Lee Harvey used to say, is that news plays a pivotal role in focusing the public on priorities. This agenda-setting role creates the environment in which public officials make their choices. It is extremely hard for public officials to make and impose difficult choices on a public unprepared for them, or not even aware that the choices may be necessary.

The rise of digital distribution has changed this priority-setting process dramatically. In the last century, a handful of television networks and major newspapers set the national news agenda. If these “gatekeepers” decided a story was important, the nation would see and hear that it was important.

There were plenty of problems with this system. Many significant stories went uncovered. But convince fewer than a dozen anchors and editors that a public health crisis was looming and the entire country would know, quickly.

This did not necessarily make choices easer for elected leaders. But it did mean the public would understand that choices were necessary.

Communication is far more fragmented now, as we all know. But it remains essential to create relationships and channels of communication before the crisis.

The rise of the Internet (and big tech platforms like Facebook and Google) decimated the business models of those mega media companies and fragmented the gathering and distribution of news. For better and worse, it is no longer possible to control the news agenda through a handful of big organizations.

We used to describe news organizations as gatekeepers. It is probably better now to think of them as leaders of a pack that roams civil society, dispersing and recombining in unpredictable ways.

But as this image says, packs do still have leaders.

These are the organizations public health officials need to work with in advance of the next crisis to prepare trusted channels of information that can be used quickly not just to distribute facts but to share the urgency of a fast-spreading epidemic.

There will be venerable organizations on this list, like the Associated Press and the New York Times. But there are also others that did not exist even a decade or two ago, digital news sites like STAT and Kaiser Health News.

There is no way to guarantee the pack will follow these leaders in a crisis. But without them we can be assured that as the crisis rises, the conversation will descend into chaos that will only confuse the public and make political decisions harder. We know this, because it is what happened in 2020.

The other, related, challenge is caused by the change in how news is distributed. The organizations that gathered the news also used to package it, in a newspaper or broadcast, and then deliver it to you. They shaped not just the news but the ranking of news priorities.

But now increasing numbers of people receive their news through digital intermediaries like Facebook, X (the ex-Twitter), TikTok and messaging apps. Even if the news is created by reliable journalists, its relative presence in your feed is controlled by the algorithms created by these digital intermediaries. So in planning for the next pandemic it is also crucial to include the non-news organizations, like Facebook and X, that put a heavy thumb on who sees what news.