Communicate hope to motivate the public during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and implementation of vaccines. Here, we examine how health authorities and governments most effectively motivate the public by focusing on a specific race: between the Alpha variant and the implementation of the first generation of COVID-19 vaccinations in the winter of 2021. Following prior research on crisis communication, we focus on appeals to fear and hope using communicative aids in the form of visualizations based on epidemiological modelling. Using a population-based experiment conducted in United States ([Formula: see text]), we demonstrate that a hope-oriented visual communication aid, depicting the competing effects on the epidemic curve of (1) a more infectious variant and (2) vaccinations, motivates public action more effectively than a fear-oriented visual communication, focusing exclusively on the threat of the new variant. The importance of the implementation of such hope-oriented messages is further highlighted by cross-national representative surveys from eight countries ([Formula: see text]), which demonstrate that feelings of fear towards the Alpha variant alone were insufficient to activate strong compliance. Overall, these findings provide general insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Figure 1

The effectiveness of public health communication with (Panel A) and without (Panel B) the hope associated with vaccines. Panels (C),(D) report unstandardized coefficients of marginal effects from OLS regressions that compare responses in the Hope Condition (Panel A) and Threat Condition (Panel B) to a control condition, respectively. Hinges denote $95\%$ confidence intervals and whiskers denote $99\%$ confidence intervals.

Figure 2

Knowledge, fear and behavior change because of new, more infectious variants. Proportions with associated $95\%$ confidence intervals within each country (Denmark, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Italy, France, Germany & Hungary), that agree ‘completely’ or ‘somewhat’ with the statements: (1) ‘I have heard about new variants of the corona-virus that are more infectious’, (2) ‘I am worried about the new, more infectious variants of the corona-virus’, (3) ‘I follow the health authorities’ advice to a greater extent because of new, more infectious variants of the corona-virus’. Total $N=3,995$.

Figure 3

Impact of restrictions, relative transmission and additional vaccination. Each display contains a baseline scenario with B.1.1.7 (red) and without B.1.1.7 (dashed blue) as well as a scenario with B.1.1.7 and $10\%$ more effective restrictions (green). A) reference $R_t=1.0$ and a vaccination rate of 500 persons per day for 60 days and then $5000$ per day. B) As A) but with reference $R_t=1.1$. C) as A) but with relative $R_t$ for B.1.1.7 equal to 1.7 instead of 1.6. D) as A) but with a vaccination rate of 2500 persons per day for the first 60 days. The hospital capacity is 200 beds related to covid-19 (dotted line). All displays are normalized to a population of 1 million.