The good, the bad and the ugly: learning lessons from the UK’s COVID-19 communication

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact globally, affecting economies and societies as a result of the health impacts of the virus itself and also the policy decisions made amidst uncertainty (Smith et al. 2020). Attempts to control the spread of the virus have had to be carefully managed by national governments against negative impacts on economies and public freedoms (Wright et al. 2021). However, the effectiveness of such actions, assessed in terms of infection rates and public opinion, has varied. For instance, consider the variation in disease burden between New Zealand, where disease burden was low and the country was able to achieve COVID-19 elimination ( Jefferies et al. 2020), against that of the United Kingdom, which has been one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19, as measured by infection rates, deaths and lost economic production (Worldometer 2021). Effective and timely communication and leadership are central to the suc- cessful management of the COVID-19 pandemic, playing an important role in the complex relationship between scientific knowledge and individuals’ beliefs and behaviours. In this vein, it could be argued that messaging about the COVID-19 outbreak by national governments could have played, and will continue to play, a critical role in limiting the spread of disease. However, attempts to inform and educate the public about COVID-19, and the effective prevention measures that should be followed, can be impacted by the volume of information available and the prevalence of misinformation, especially online. This is because we live in a world of information overload, whereby informa- tion is shared across multiple platforms, by numerous people and organisations, and there are multiple interpretations of the same information (Bettis-Outland 2012). Therefore, ensuring the information that the public receives is true, complete and accurate is a challenge (Wiesenberg and Tench 2020). It is also relevant to consider other factors that can affect compliance with information, such as trust and confidence in the communicator (Spiegelhalter 2017; Tur- cotte et al. 2015). To assess the UK government’s communication management of the COVID-19 crisis, and the public’s perceptions of this communication and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003184669-15 152 Ralph Tench and Gemma Bridge communications from other platforms and sources, two online surveys were developed. In this chapter, we discuss the results of both surveys. We also discuss implications of the research and highlight how communication professionals could adapt to become more effective communicators when sharing informa- tion related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and future health crises