Leveraging investments, promoting transparency and mobilising communities: a qualitative analysis of news articles about how the Ebola outbreak informed COVID-19 response in five African countries.
IF 7.1 2区 医学Q1 PUBLIC, ENVIRONMENTAL & OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH
Lauren P Courtney, Manon Billaud, Alex Paulenich, Rob Chew, Zainab Alidina, Meredith Pinto
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background: The WHO declared the novel COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic in March 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic was unprecedented, prior experiences with diseases such as Middle East respiratory syndrome, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Ebola shaped many countries' preparedness and response strategies. Although lessons learnt from outbreak responses have been documented from a variety of sources, news media play a special role through their dissemination of news to the general public. This study investigated news media to explore how lessons learnt from the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 informed the COVID-19 responses in several African countries.
Methods: We conducted qualitative analysis on a dataset of previously compiled COVID-19-related news articles published from 1 March 2020 to 31 August 2020. This dataset included 34,225 articles from 6 countries. We filtered the dataset to only include articles with the keyword 'Ebola'. We used a machine-learning text classification model to identify relevant articles with clear and specific lessons learnt. We conducted inductive and deductive coding to categorise lessons learnt and identify emergent themes.
Results: Of the 861 articles containing the word 'Ebola', 18.4% (N=158) with lessons learnt from Ebola were included across five of the countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia and Sierra Leone. News articles highlighted three emergent themes: the importance of leveraging existing resources and past response system investments, promoting transparency in public health messaging and engaging community leaders in all phases of the response.
Conclusions: Findings suggest fostering trust prior to and throughout an outbreak facilitates timely implementation and compliance of mitigation strategies. Trust can be built by leveraging existing resources, being communicative and transparent about their funding allocation and decision-making and engaging communities.
期刊介绍：
BMJ Global Health is an online Open Access journal from BMJ that focuses on publishing high-quality peer-reviewed content pertinent to individuals engaged in global health, including policy makers, funders, researchers, clinicians, and frontline healthcare workers. The journal encompasses all facets of global health, with a special emphasis on submissions addressing underfunded areas such as non-communicable diseases (NCDs). It welcomes research across all study phases and designs, from study protocols to phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small or specialized studies. The journal also encourages opinionated discussions on controversial topics.
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