Department of Public Relations

Crisis communication in PR

Seminar paper: “Pandemic outbreak and the Crisis afterwards ”

Mentor: Prepared By:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Shener Bilalli Berk Dişo

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 2022,Skopje

Abstract

Begun in 2020 till this day there has happened an pandemic crisis in the whole world that our lives has
been changed based on everyday living. I want to talk about a virus that suddenly changes our lives
completely and stops us; Covid 19- Coronavirus... We've been fighting this virus, which is
undetectable to the human sight but kills people, for months, in both physiological and psychological
ways. Even though pandemics approximately happens in every 100 years and Although people
manage to overcome such diseases the pandemic was unexpected and came to our lives as a big
surprise , it started fast and it had been spread all around the world. We’ll see how one guy from
China, Wuhan city that have eaten his lunch differently, of course with the effect of their tradition can
change the balances on the world even though it was out of his hands to infect something like this.

Introduction:

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a Public Health Emergency
of International Concern and a Pandemic on March 11, 2020. The pandemic had produced over 520
million illnesses and 6.26 million confirmed deaths as of May 14, 2022 making it one of the deadliest
in history. The COVID-19 pandemic has cost many lives around the world and poses an unprecedented
threat to public health, food systems, and the workplace. The pandemic's economic and social effects
are devastating: tens of millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty. At the start of the
coronavirus outbreak, people were against deadly pandemic which there wasn’t so much information
about the crisis. Since it started to spread all around the world it’s effects on our lives has got more and
more important, as we started take cover against it. We started to wear masks in our everyday living,
countries started to close borders to their neighbours and started quarantines daily, weelkly, montlhy
all according to their policies. Scientists, doctors arouınd the world started to search for a cure for the
coronavirus, search for a vaccine which will eventually lower the effect of the virus. I think it would
not be wrong to say that while it directly affects the health of millions, it indirectly affects other areas
of our lives negatively and sometimes positively. It has profoundly affected our health, the economy,
our daily life, our interpersonal relationships, and our relationship with ourselves. We began to stay at
home from an ongoing business life for adults, and from school and university life for children and
young people, due to a sudden change in our daily routine, and it had bigger effects on the small kids
because it had much more psychological damage on them, thinking of from the small ages they have
to think to put masks, to stay at home while before the pandemic they were living freely, not having to
think about pandemic which the name “pandemic” were not known for them.

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Type of the Crisis:

Economical and Sudden crisis – Pandemic crisises has happened everytime since humans have
started to evolve on the world, as we can see the examples through our history books.

I determine the crisis as a economical type of crisis because it’s effect on the world cost mostly in
economical part as well as it caused health problems to people. As the name suggests, the crisis
happened suddenly and unfortunately people were not ready to have this pandemic and to be spread in
the world fast like this, and ofcourse to change the balance.

Crisis happened economical mostly because the way of countries borders were closed, access to raw
materials became difficult, those who had to manufacture from outside and bring products had many
difficulties.

Stages of the Crisis:

First stage- First stage of the crisis is when the pandemic outbreak happened at China and the videos
of the sick people were spreading around the world happened. People didn’t knew how to react or how
dangerious it is, in fact people were not aware of what they are up against because with the little of
propaganda too there were first videos of people falling down on the streets like “zombies” so there
was an uncertainity of what human kind were against. WHO – World Health Organization requested
information from the Chinese government and started to send their officials on China to evaluate what
was going on and after determining the outbreak they said that its caused by a novel coronavirus. So in
this stage officials and people were trying to understand the crisis situation what were the reasons and
what it actually was. Until the outbreak came to others countries from China, people were not aware of
what kind of contagious virus they were facing against and that’s why they didn’t had time to prepare
for it because it was happening so fast that everyday there were new covid case’s around the world
coming in daylight.

Second Stage - The second stage was now when people knew what it was but thought about what
needed to be done. Officials knew what they were up against but they had to take responsibility to
manage the crisis situation so most of the government’s first act was to close the border’s to their
neighbors and not letting people in and out of the country. They were giving information to citizens
what was the coronavirous outbreak about, how the virus is contagious . This disease, which causes an
epidemic worldwide, can cause death by affecting the lungs. Although the disease has many
symptoms, these symptoms can be confused with other viral infections that affect the upper respiratory
tract, such as the flu or the common cold. COVID-19 is diagnosed with a special test. The success of
the treatment varies according to the patient's condition. Some people who get the disease can get over
the disease without showing any symptoms. After these general things were known almost everywhere
and the fact of that the coronavirus became part of our lives anymore the officials started to widen the

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ropes which they were allowing to travel to other countries but with the rules of making an
coronavirus test before traveling to some other countries and if they were caught to the pandemic they
had to quarantine for 14 days (later it was down to 7 days) before traveling somewhere else.

When there were months passed after the coronavirus outbreak, because of quarantines and masks the
worlds economy balance , businesses , people physically started to collapse . The economical sides of
the pandemic hit the most smaller businesses because of the borders closing, panic everywhere the
prices were going up and down in an unbalancing way which were started to reduce incomes for the
businesses and for the citizens. I can give some examples such as flour, sunflower oil, toilet papers,
hygiene products were almost non-findable on the markets because there were panic going everywhere
thinking of there wouldn’t be enough products for everyone and people thought there is going to be
food shortage. The crisis was in a very bad state, with the fact of the older people that were up to
against these kind of pandemic outbreaks ( not as big as this time) and they were acting according to
these thinkings like we will not be able to go to the markets , we will not have resources, we will
starve and so on and that was the some examples what people were up against.

Third stage- In this stage, as the number of deaths around the world increased and life as we knew it
changed dramatically, one thing became clear: the virus was spreading quickly, and the hunt for a
vaccine was on. And the first vaccine was found by the BioNTech owners Özlem Türeci and Uğur
Şahin, and Pfizer. The question that were appearing in peoples mind were how safe the vaccine is and
how much does the vaccine protect us from the coronavirus. When we see the examples from the
earlier pandemic outbreaks all the vaccines were found after many many years of the outbreak for
example Rabies diseases vaccine was found in 4 years starting from 1881 to 1885, Measles 9 years,
the flu 14 years and so many others, and thanks to technology today the vaccine was found in almost 1
year after the coronavirus outbreak happened and that question apperead on people’s mind how the
vaccine was found in such a fast way, and people were hesitant for the vaccine. After it was
discovered, every country made an order for the vaccine to give their citizens and ofcourse the
powerful countries were getting it first but the biggest problem here was not everyone were taking the
Vaccine even though the death cases from the pandemic were happening every day and the death toll
was rising every day. Against the crisis, countries started to look for ways to motivate, direct them to
get the vaccine and in result some countries started to give little amount of money to those who get the
vaccine but the biggest advantage of the vaccine was that citizens could fly to other countries, travel if
they have got the vaccine and those anti-vaccine people were not be able to use these advantages. But
of course the situations were not same for every country, while some countries didn’t made many
restrictions about antivacciners, some countries tried to forcefully get their citizens vaccinated by
making restrictions such as students cant go to schools, adults cant work unless they work from home,
and im not mentioning the part of the masks that were a must to wear to go anywhere or to walk
outside. These sort of uncertaintys were happening between countries and its residences until people

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were fed up with all the depression, drama, negativity happening around the world and their desire for
the pandemic to end made things easier to have a collaboration in the crisis.

Detection – The virus first appeared on a local scale in November 2019, followed by the first big
cluster in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. SARS-CoV-2 was first suspected to have made the
transfer to humans in Wuhan, China. Later theories suggested it may have started as a biological
weapon in a Chinese lab. SARS-CoV-2 spread both inside and outside China, infecting people who
had no direct contact with animals. This means that the illness spreads from person to
person.Coronaviruses acquire their name from the spike proteins that emerge from them, giving them a
crown-like appearance. These spike proteins are crucial to the virus's biology. The spike protein is the
part of the virus that infects a human cell and allows it to multiply and spread to additional cells.

It was detected by the doctors and scientists and on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization
(WHO) proclaimed the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic.

Over the past 2 weeks, the number of cases outside China increased 13-fold and the number of
countries with cases increased threefold

(Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, 2020)

Prevention/Preparation – When the crisis happened , at first preparation was panic based because the
crisis was happened globally and first steps of the officials to prevent crisis was to close the borders
and stay in quarantine basically it’s purpose was to handle the crisis inside the borders without getting
more coronavirus cases but it was too late because the covid was very contagious and there was
already infected people that came through airplanes, borders and the problem here was that the
symptoms of the virus wasn’t showing from the first when someone is infected but most of the times it
was visible that someone was caught by the virus after first two days. Preparation should have been
more earlier than 2019 when the first cases were showing up about what to do if a pandemic happens
because the oldest confirmed fossil which is 3.5 billion years old in our earth always there has been
pandemics happening and in our modern world when it is so easy to find knowledge through internet
or old books, humans should have learnt from the old times and make preparations for the pandemic
crisis before it happens, instead our scientists underestimated a possible pandemic crisis situation and
moved forward in their own interests, own problems which were happening in that time.

Containment - The containment from the crisis was actually the foundation of the vaccines. Of course
there has been temporary solutions like the masks, not going into the crowded places but as I said
these were temporary and wasn’t good enough to calm people and it was a risk communication
because it effected people in a way that everyone was terrified when they were not wearing masks or
when they were in a crowded place so it wasnt as good as it could have been a communication the way
the solutions were put on paper. I said vaccines because when the vaccine was founded, the

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community started to pace down about the crisis situation, it created good communication between
people as a savior for the pandemic, quarantine days even though the foundation of vaccines wasn’t
good enough to end limitations immediately that were put by the officials, it was enough to calm
people down and think that everything will go back to old normal days because the vaccine was found
in only a year.

Recovery – Recovery eventually started when the distribution of the vaccines were started to be
distributed in almost every country, and the more vaccine people took, more people would gain
flexibility in rules and would end the crisis faster. With the officials trying to explain their citizens
about taking vaccine in selected doses by the time, the life would be back to normal there has been
conflict with the ones that doesn’t wanted to take the vaccine because people didn’t trust the scientists
or there was people that thought they didn’t need the vaccine to protect themselves from the virus
because their immunity system was good enough. There has been disagreements between the vaccine
takers and anti-vaccine people and this was causing the crisis to last longer in the community and the
rules to proceed as it was. But by the time, However, over time, an agreement process took place in
order that people got bored with this pandemic and that such restrictions or such processes would not
continue any longer. Although the Ukraine-Russia war was unfortunate for the two countries, it was
lucky to forget the pandemic in this process and to loosen the rules.

Learning- What we learnt about this crisis is that when something like pandemic that happened would
happen to people, to let them terrified, to take their freedom of life to go outside, to live how they were
living earlier would cause panic in a way that it can lead to be unpredictable for the risk
communicators, even though it is necessary to prevent the crisis, this kind of sacrificies need to be
done. But if we look as a particular in this topic, we learned that after the covid pandemic started some
officials choosed a way to fear their people about the virus to lead them to put on masks, to stay at
home would lead them in a negative way which effects their everyday life.

Crisis communication plan – Maybe a good fair communication, a better communication from
officials as a honest for example while telling their citizens that the virus is deadly, risky, contagious
instead it would have been much more calmer to tell them yes its risky virus and very contagious but it
is not so terrifying to make you go down physchological, to not go outside stay at home for days, but if
people would wash their hands, take care of themselves, not getting close to much with other people,
in a good language if these were told there would have been less conflict and hate that we were facing
till these tough times. Because when we see now even without the masks, with the parties happening,
people getting together in a closed places and while all these is happening virus is still living with us
together, and it isn’t as bad as it was worried when we were told once the pandemic started all these
could have been handled better, im not an expert and definitely not someone authorized to teach them

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what their job is, but as a participant in this crisis and observer I can see that this crisis could have
been solved in a better ways.

Analysis of the response – I have analyzed about what was the reason behind the crisis that happened
and that last almost 3 years and still we can feel the presence of the pandemic which has caused
damages in our lives. When health is in the line, humans cant act always as professional as they are
because even though “officials” has the responsibilities to take actions against the crisis, they are
humans too and they can be effected too so when the crisis happened it happened to all of us. I have
wrote the stages of the crisis which at first led us to panic, but moved on and how the virus became
part of our lives.By the time goes and by the help of a foundation which we call vaccines helped
people to get over the stress more easily and in the last stage where anymore the pandemic crisis isn’t
our first priority in life and has became part of our lives.

Conclusion and recommendations – In a conclusion, while the crisis made mostly negative impact in
our lives, people tend to remember to take care of themselves, wash their hands more, eat vitamins,
stay together at their home with their families and many positive things happened which were under
the shadow of a crisis. I can recommend that, hope not but if we are caught again in a situation where a
pandemic crisis happens, we all to listen what our experts, officials, those that are in charge for our
health to take care of the pandemic and to listen what they say step by step, in that way we can block
the crisis to last longer as it was. And last, every crisis has an end, what matters is how we react to the
crisis and what we can do to change the results of the crisis.

References-

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/about-covid-19/basics-covid-19.html

(Basics of COVID-19, 2021)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/health/pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine.html

(How Pfizer Makes Its Covid-19 Vaccine, 2021)

https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline

(Listings of WHO’s response to COVID-19, 2020)

https://www.medscape.com/answers/2500114-197402/how-did-the-coronavirus-outbreak-start

(Cennimo, David J, 2021)

https://www.who.int/news/item/13-10-2020-impact-of-covid-19-on-people's-livelihoods-their-health-a
nd-our-food-systems

(Impact of COVID-19 on people's livelihoods, their health and our food systems, 2020)