The Role of the Communication Discipline to Tackle COVID-19: Interrogating Positive Deviations and Critical Discourses

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic descended on us in an unexpected, uncontrollable, and unpredictable manner, disrupting the world order and affecting all sectors of human society. The world had little time to prepare for the ravages of a novel and highly infectious coronavirus. By February 2021, some 112 million people had contracted COVID-19 globally, and 2.5 million had died. Even with the availability of vaccines at warp speed, and vaccination efforts rolling out in early 2021, it is still uncertain how the pandemic—with all its highly infectious mutant variants—would play out. No one knows with any certainty what the endpoint will be, and what lies ahead. Since the spread of the COVID-19 was uncontrollable from the beginning, and little was known about the novel virus, the pandemic response has varied greatly at the global, national, and regional levels. Remarkably, several scientifically advanced countries had dismal pandemic responses, notably the USA and the UK. The U.S. arguably had the worst response, accounting for 25% (28 million) of the global COVID-19 cases, and 20% (500,000) of the deaths. In contrast, several developing countries of Asia and Africa have done a remarkable job of controlling COVID-19 with scant resources. For instance, to date, Bhutan has recorded only one death among its population, and Vietnam, Rwanda, and Senegal have, respectively, recorded 35, 226, and 700 deaths (Drexler, 2021). While the reasons for pandemic success vary from country-to-country, the key reasons for success centre around various communicative functions—the exercise of political will through the setting of media and public agendas (Dearing & Rogers, 1996), attentive and compassionate leadership with safety nets for the most vulnerable (Singhal & Rogers, 2003), clear cut publichealth guidance (Kim et al., 2014), early and relentless contact-tracing of people’s social networks, and a shared understanding of the value of preventive practices such as quarantining, social distancing, masking, and hand hygiene (Kim, 2020; Kim & Kreps, 2020). Unlike the disastrous leadership of Donald Trump in the USA, in Bhutan, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck set the policy, media, and public agenda for COVID-19 right off the bat by telling government officials that even one death was too many, that detailed plans be made, Journal of Creative Communications 16(2) 135–138, 2021 © 2021 MICA-The School of Ideas Reprints and permissions: in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india DOI: 10.1177/09732586211002930 journals.sagepub.com/home/crc