During ongoing crisis or emergencies like COVID-19 outbreak, effective communication is critical for communities as they rely on information from responsible bodies to understand the unfolding occurrence and make decisions to effectively respond to it.
In the face of global infectious-disease emergencies like COVID-19, countries have a responsibility to be transparent in their reporting and actions both to their own people and international community in order to facilitate and accelerate cooperation that will ultimately curtail outbreaks and minimize harm.
To avoid confusion and mistrust, effective communication among institutions, experts and officials is imperative to support the efforts of prevention and control process.
In Ethiopia, the government has taken
various measures to prevent the spread of the disease. In addition, it is also important to take lessons from the experiences of other countries. In a recent article published on Harvard Business Review under the title Lessons from Italy’s Response to Coronavirus, it is stated that threats such as pandemics that evolve in a nonlinear fashion (i.e., they start small but exponentially intensify) are especially tricky to confront because of the challenges of rapidly interpreting what is happening in real time. The most effective time to take strong action is extremely early, when the threat appears to be small — or even before there are any cases.
One of the lessons that can be drawn from the Italian experience, according to the article, is the importance of systematic approaches and the perils of partial solutions. The Italian government dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic by issuing a series of decrees that gradually increased restrictions within lockdown areas (“red zones”), which were then expanded until they ultimately applied to the entire country.
In normal times, this approach would probably be considered prudent and perhaps even wise. In this situation, it backfired for two reasons. First, the article stated, it was inconsistent with the rapid exponential spread of the virus. The “facts on the ground” at any point in time were simply not predictive of what the situation would be just a few days later. As a result, Italy followed the spread of the virus rather than prevented it. Second, the selective approach might have inadvertently facilitated the spread of the virus. Consider the decision to initially lock down some regions but not others. When the decree announcing the closing of northern Italy became public, it touched off a massive exodus to southern Italy, undoubtedly spreading the virus to regions where it had not been present.
This illustrates is what is now clear to many observers: An effective response to the virus needs to be orchestrated as a coherent system of actions taken simultaneously. The results of the approaches taken in China and South Korea underscore this point. While the public discussion of the policies followed in these countries often focuses on single elements of their models (such as extensive testing), what truly characterizes their effective responses is the multitude of actions that were taken at once. Testing is effective when it’s combined with rigorously contact tracing, and tracing is effective as long as it is combined with an effective communication system that collects and disseminates information on the movements of potentially infected people, and so forth.
Up until today, Ethiopia has 29 confirmed coronavirus cases with no death. To prevent further escalation, all stakeholders have to be able to effectively utilize all possible communication means to strictly enforce the measures that have been taken by the government and constantly inform the public.
The Ethiopian Herald April 2/2020
BY TSEGAYE TILAHUN
