Communicating COVID‐19: Interdisciplinary perspectives. By MoniqueLewis, ElizaGovender, and KateHolland (Eds.), Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham. 395pp. £109 (hardcover) £87.50 (ebk). ISBN: 978‐3‐030‐79734‐8

Abstract

Covid-19 has been dominant for the past 2 years. Many will have felt the impact of the pandemic in every area of their lives. Communication shaped, and continues to shape, our experience. Individuals were reportedly glued to the news in initial stages of Covid-19 to keep track of changing local and national guidance. Lewis et al.'s volume has begun the task of compiling some of the initial academic work on communication around Covid-19, examining the social and political structures of the communication we received. Clear from the title, this book complies work in 18 chapters from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and looks at communication about Covid-19 from a range of global positions.Fake news and misinformation are serious issues in a pandemic. The authors comment that the initial uncertainty about Covid-19 gave a communication space, which was rapidly filled with misinformation and disinformation. As the pandemic progressed, these added communication 'noise', leading to issues of trust and scepticism of public health communication. The first chapters examine some quite starkly different approaches to communicating news, both exploring solutions for keeping people engaged. The first provides an analysis of how local community journalism can be mobilised to provide information that is clear, accurate and trustworthy. In contrast, the second chapter examines how major news broadcasters utilised the epicentre of a pandemic (hospital intensive care units) to broadcast news updates and how people engaged (or switched off) with this approach. As the book progresses a number of authors bring different theories to explain the models of Covid-19 health communication, and how that was different country to country. It is useful to see explorations of what voices were missing and the inequalities that health communication can perpetuate. Authors' styles vary throughout the book, some providing more reflective comment on how they overcame challenges of advocating for accurate communication from policy makers, some providing a more classical write up of communication research they initiated early in the pandemic.As an academic that works in the science of communication, but examines conversations between people (such as healthcare practitioners and patients), it was interesting to learn about the structures and systems of communication that local conversations about COVID-19 sit