Showing up early and often is a core tenet of public health crisis communications, yet it can be difficult to execute during the panic of a crisis. For reasons having to do with politics or personality, leaders often seem evasive when they most need to be visible. Subsequently, real or perceived lack of transparency undermines everything they do. “People don’t expect perfection, but they do expect presence,” Mandy Cohen, the former head of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me.
Watching Dr. Shah’s pandemic news conferences, I was surprised that I hadn’t seen them before. They were a textbook example of well-executed pandemic communication. Day after day, he showed up at 2 p.m. in front of a microphone. He began with a rundown of statistics — how many people were in the hospital, how many cases had been diagnosed — and then calmly took reporter questions. He was quick to acknowledge both the extent of and limits to his knowledge. He was warm, confident, personal and clear.
“He was sort of what got me through the day — because I’m a widow, I live by myself,” Cindy Guertin, a now 84-year-old resident of Yarmouth, Maine, told me. “Who was going to help me figure out what to do? Well, he did.”
Maine did relatively well during the pandemic: Death rates were low and vaccination rates high, largely because state decision makers made good choices, compared with some of their peers. But those decisions came with trade-offs and consequences anyway: There were protests against closures, economic stress, learning loss and preventable deaths from other causes.
The real distinguishing factor of Maine’s response was Dr. Shah’s steady presence in the public eye. He continued scheduled news conferences at least a few times a week for 15 months, and then appeared regularly after that — longer than many other pandemic leaders did. In doing so, he demonstrated a high tolerance for frustration, disappointment and criticism. He communicated uncertainty well, from the beginning. By virtue of his consistency, he also communicated through that uncertainty — remaining present as his claims played out and accepting the pushback and second-guessing that inevitably resulted. He took accountability and managed to divorce his reputation from any single pandemic moment.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
