225 - The Challenges With Communicating COVID-19 Prevention Measures
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Communicating evidence-based COVID-19 prevention measures like mask-wearing and hand washing has been a challenge. What's further complicated buy-in are public health officials and politicians creating policies that are not backed in science like closing parks in Spain or banning the sale of open-toed shoes in South Africa. Science journalist Roxanne Khamsi talks with Stephanie Desmon about the harm of imposing policies that aren't evidence-based. They also discuss the consequences of trying to communicate about a virus with devastating effects that are largely invisible from the public eye.
KEYWORDS: health communication; policy
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:39.0 | at jhh.edu. |
| 0:40.5 | That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.6 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to freelance science journalist Roxanne Camsey about the challenges |
| 0:53.4 | we face in communicating how to keep safe during the |
| 0:56.7 | pandemic. Let's listen. Roxanne Camsey. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much for |
| 1:03.2 | having, Stephanie. So you are a freelance science writer who has covered the pandemic from the |
| 1:09.9 | beginning and you've written some really interesting stories. And so I'd like to sort of talk to science writer who has covered the pandemic from the beginning. |
| 1:13.3 | And you've written some really interesting stories. |
| 1:19.1 | And so I'd like to sort of talk to you today about how we communicate about the pandemic. |
| 1:25.1 | Something I wanted to talk to you about is sort of we have, we talk about having science-based COVID prevention measures. |
| 1:28.8 | And while things like, of course, |
| 1:36.5 | mask wearing and hand washing are definitely backed by science, we have things that maybe aren't so backed by science that we're claiming are. Talk to me a little bit about that and maybe give me a few |
| 1:40.9 | examples. Yeah, I think what you're saying is really true that |
| 1:45.7 | there are some things that make a lot of sense scientifically. And then we have seen in this |
| 1:50.3 | pandemic a couple occasions, or maybe more than a couple occasions where public health officials |
| 1:56.8 | or politicians have come forth with some policies to cope with COVID-19 that just have people |
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