Early stage risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) strategies and measures against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic crisis

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has proven to be tenacious and shows that the global community is still poorly prepared to handling such emerging pandemics. Enhancing global solidarity in emergency preparedness and response, and the mobilization of conscience and cooperation, can serve as an excellent source of ideas and measures in a timely manner. The article provides an overview of the key components of risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) strategies at the early stages in vulnerable nations and populations, and highlight contextual recommendations for strengthening coordinated and sustainable RCCE preventive and emergency response strategies against COVID-19 pandemic. Global solidarity calls for firming governance, abundant community participation and enough trust to boost early pandemic preparedness and response. Promoting public RCCE response interventions needs crucially improving government health systems and security proactiveness, community to individual confinement, trust and resilience solutions. To better understand population risk and vulnerability, as well as COVID-19 transmission dynamics, it is important to build intelligent systems for monitoring isolation/quarantine and tracking by use of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems algorithms. Experiences and lessons learned from the international community is crucial for emerging pandemics prevention and control programs, especially in promoting evidence-based decision-making, integrating data and models to inform effective and sustainable RCCE strategies, such as local and global safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines and mass immunization programs.

Implementing Public Health Strategies—The Need for Educational Initiatives: A Systematic Review

“…Preventive and emergency response strategies should be coordinated and strengthened at the community level by improving community resilience and through educational initiatives. The crucial steps in achieving a resilient and knowledgeable community are a transparent and trustful government-people relationship, improved health systems security proactivity, community to individual confinement, trust, and resilient solutions [76,77].…”

The effects of community safety support on COVID‐19 event strength perception, risk perception, and health tourism intention: The moderating role of risk communication

“…Jia et al ( 2021 ) suggested that the COVID‐19 pandemic and lockdown policies of community negatively affect people's psychological well‐being. Indeed, community and its organizational managers provide support for safety by addressing safety issues, which turns out to be another way of spreading the risk of the pandemic (Wang, Lin, et al, 2020 ) and may further result in people's risk perception (Tambo et al, 2021 ).…”

“…This is consistent with our research hypotheses. In terms of the novelty recognition of the COVID‐19 pandemic, community safety support enables to make the public to have knowledge of risk information of COVID‐19 pandemic to reduce people's recognition of novelty (Tambo et al, 2021 ). Then, for the disruption recognition and criticality recognition, we found that community safety support is not always a good thing for the residents, which can be seen a way of risk communication; that is, community supports the safety by taking a large number of measures to increase people's recognition of disruption and criticality about the COVID‐19 pandemic.…”

“…In order to prevent the spread of the COVID‐19 pandemic, villages and communities have adopted various methods such as blocking roads and gates (Miao et al, 2020 ; Pan et al, 2020 ; Xuan Tran et al, 2020 ), and community pandemic prevention is regarded as an effective measurement under the COVID‐19 pandemic (Tambo et al, 2021 ). Therefore, the scholars began to discuss the issue of community pandemic prevention.…”

Risk communication and community engagement strategies for COVID-19 in 13 African countries

“…Lack of clear roles of partners in RCCE is also another challenge that can be attributed to feeble health systems on the continent. 84 While RCCE plays a key role in outbreak response, poorly defined stakeholder roles can prove to be ineffective. 85 African countries also have low healthcare workforce 86 and limited experience in coordination and reporting 87 which are crucial to effective RCCE.…”