Communication of the COVID-19 Pandemic by the WHO Analysing the Flow of Information from Organisational Communication to Media Reporting

Abstract

At the end of 2019, a new virus was discovered in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization (WHO) began communicating the new virus, known as COVID-19 and on March 11, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. This aim of this study is to find out how the WHO communicated the pandemic and how the online media used WHO's communication to inform those affected. This study focuses on the areas of health and crisis communication and the communication of emerging infectious diseases. In addition, it presents relevant literature on media studies and journalism in the health sector. Qualitative studies were carried out to analyse public relations material and compare it with reporting of online media. The findings show that the media do not always fully represent the WHO's communication and are therefore presented differently.