(CN) — Stay at home. Safer at home. Shelter in place. On pause. Lockdown. Shutdown.
The novel coronavirus pandemic has forced a recalibration of familiar language and raised questions of how leaders should communicate with their constituents in a public health crisis.
As the Covid-19 wave hits the United States, state and municipal leaders across the country have issued their constituents catchy recommendations, if not full-on orders, with the same basic message: Stay home as much as possible to slow the spread of the virus.
“There's no consensus on things,” said Wendy Mariner, a professor at Boston University with degrees in public health and law, on the phrasing used by politicians to keep people at home during the outbreak.
“There’s no legal term, you know,” Mariner continued in a phone interview. “Physical distancing is not a legal term. It's just descriptive of what they want people to do.”
In terms of descriptiveness, she added, “physical distancing” gets to the point a bit better than “social distancing.”
As the world grapples with a pandemic unprecedented in most people’s lifetimes, the inclination is repurpose language they understand for concepts that are entirely new.
Mariner noted, for example, that the term “shelter in place” was used after the Sept. 11, 2001, and Boston Marathon terrorist attacks when leaders were concerned other attacks might be coming and had not tracked down the perpetrators. It is also used in active-shooter situations.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed was among those who leaned on the terminology earlier this month as she ordered 6.7 million people in six counties to “shelter in place” to slow the spread of Covid-19.
Later Breed shifted her language, calling it a “public health order” that required San Franciscans “to remain at home with exceptions only for essential outings.”
Mariner said that and other phrases, like “lockdown” and “shutdown,” are “generic terms that can describe a general set of practices.” But exactly what those practices include is up to the states and may not be encapsulated in a pithy declaration.
Experts agree the need for clear, consistent messaging is paramount.
“It is critically important in a pandemic, as in every public health emergency, to have clear and consistent messages repeated through multiple channels from credible sources,” said Jay Bernhardt, who was director of the National Center for Health Marketing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2005-10, a tenure during which the H1N1 pandemic caused 12,469 deaths in the United States.
Now the dean of the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin, Bernhardt recommended that all government leaders, regardless of their office, “listen to the CDC subject matter experts and follow their guidance without variation.”
“They are the best in the world at what they do and it is extremely dangerous, for all of us, for government officials to ignore their advice,” Bernhardt said in an email.
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Confusion Abounds
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