Posted: February 8, 2020

2019 Novel Coronavirus
(“Wuhan Coronavirus”; officially COVID-19)
Relevant Articles on this Website

As I write this in early February 2020, the novel coronavirus that started spreading from Wuhan, China in late 2019 looks likely to become a pandemic of unknown severity.

My wife and colleague Jody Lanard and I are coming out of near-total retirement to do a little writing about Wuhan coronavirus risk communication. Everything on this website that’s explicitly about the current pandemic-to-be is here.

You might also want to check out Jody’s Twitter feed @EIDGeek for her tweets about the coronavirus.

But virtually all the risk communication issues are familiar, and we have dealt with them before in more detail. Our writing on the swine flu pandemic of 2009–2010 is especially relevant, particularly from the early days when it looked like it might be severe. (It wasn’t.) There are also lessons worth harvesting from bird flu, Ebola, and SARS, and some that aren’t about any specific epidemic or pandemic.

Some of the articles listed below will become more or less relevant as it becomes clearer how widespread the Wuhan coronavirus is and how much severe disease it causes. The “blurb” describing each article was written when that article was first posted (except for the two Guestbook entries, which had no blurbs). These blurbs don’t necessarily reflect how the epidemics or pandemics they address turned out – but they should give you a pretty good sense of which articles are likely to be most relevant to what you are facing with the Wuhan coronavirus.

If you want more, browse through the website’s Pandemic Flu and Other Infectious Diseases Index.

Relevant Older Articles

Selected handouts from our crisis communication training course

(Note: Each link is to a PDF file larger than 10 kB and smaller than 40 kB.

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