Last Thursday, August 5, our Center for Implementation and Innovation in Health Policies (CIIPS) organized a webinar in which communication specialists analyzed, based on the lessons left by the pandemic, the fundamental aspects of health communication. 
The activity included the participation of communication experts from academia, the media and government, who presented their perspectives a year and a half into the pandemic.
The speakers of the day were:
- Fabrizio Zotta, Public Opinion analyst and Graduate in Social Communication from the FASTA University of Mar del Plata, and founder of Analipsis
- Pablo Tomino, Press Director of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires
- Elodie Martinez, coordinator of Social Networks and Fact-checking Latin America at AFP Factual.
The moderator was Mariana Comolli, journalist, graduate in Social Communication and coordinator of the IECS Communication Unit and the closing was in charge of Cintia Cejas, Coordinator of the Center for Implementation and Innovation in Health Policies (CIIPS).
Fabrizio Zotta identified different stages in the political communication strategy of the National Government. The first stage, which he placed between March and June 2020, he described as an attempt “to generate a cultural change in people so that they modify their behavior.” In that period, “risk communication was a collective construction, and all political forces were willing to make concessions in the face of the common enemy.”
Subsequently, Zotta referred to a second moment, starting in June or July 2020, in which “the scheme began to unravel, and a tailored quarantine ended up being generated.” The communication specialist characterized this stage as a “quarantine on demand” because “each of us forged in our heads a system of behavior that had more to do with personal decisions, in the absence of a risk construction strategy.” shared".
Based on his experience as head of the Press Directorate of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Pablo Tomino explained that as soon as the pandemic began, they identified the experiences of what was happening first in Asia and Europe, as a reference, to identify and correct potential mistakes. “We started with meetings and work tables in January and February 2020 to be aligned and focused in the face of a possible danger that was coming,” Tomino said and added: “Our goal was to have reliable, clear and precise communication, to inform, raise awareness, prevent and avoid panic.”
The GCBA Press Director explained that the municipal government has 20 areas, and to “not give contradictory messages, we leave nothing to chance.” He detailed, “We gave 184 press conferences with Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Fernán Quirós, 1 every 2 days with information based on evidence.” In turn, he highlighted that the conferences were seen by 3 billion people and that since the pandemic began, the journalistic demand is unprecedented. “An hour of chatting without looking at the phone gives me between 100 and 150 unanswered messages from journalists,” he said as an example.
For her part, Elodie Martinez, coordinator of Social Networks and Fact-checking Latin America at AFP Factual, referred to the phenomenon of misinformation. “During the pandemic, along with people's confinement, the use of social networks for information grew, previous beliefs were enhanced and one began to trust their close circle much more,” explained Martinez and highlighted that simultaneously, there was “a loss of patience to resort to traditional and reliable sources of information.”
Finally, Cintia Cejas, CIIPS Coordinator, made a final reflection on the relevance that communication has taken on in this new context. “Health communication has been an issue almost as important as the pandemic itself, we have been inundated by an infodemic,” she stressed. Furthermore, she pointed out that "it is necessary to implement communication policies, not improvise, invest resources in defining who is going to communicate, with what data, and exercise power in an empathetic way that allows generating dialogue."
The full video of this webinar is available here