COVID-19, a novel infectious disease that has in about 10 months claimed over one million lives and infected nearly 40 million people worldwide, appears inevitably formidable and demoralizing. Turning around COVID-19 outbreaks, however, is not rocket science, as Dr. Anthony Fauci recently commented. If people uniformly and consistently practice physical distancing, use facial masks, wash hands, and avoid touching faces, many cases of COVID-19 infections and deaths can be avoided. If citizens universally accept a future COVID-19 vaccine proven safe and effective, the COVID-19 pandemic will be over. Behavior change, it turns out, is difficult, even in the face of a deadly disease. Despite the challenges, decades of public health communication research offer a glimpse of hope that with the right messaging it is possible to enhance COVID-19 prevention behaviors.

Since we announced the Health Communication Special Issue Call for Papers (“Public Health Communication in an Age of COVID-19”) in May 2020, there has been overwhelming interest in contributing to the special issue. As outlined in the Call for Papers, we were planning to publish a set of invited commentaries and a select number of peer-reviewed research articles addressing timely issues on COVID-19 public health communication. Given the quality and quantity of submissions, it became clear that one issue is not sufficient to accommodate the full collection of selected articles. Hence the invited commentaries – 12 of them – appear in the current issue as a special forum on COVID-19 public health communication. The next issue will be a full COVID-19 special issue featuring exclusively peer-reviewed articles.

The COVID-19 special forum consists of 12 invited commentaries authored by leading health communication scholars from higher education institutions and government agencies. The invited commentaries are meant to solicit broad and rapid responses from health communication experts to chart the course for navigating the unique challenges of public health communication midst the COVID-19 pandemic. The commentaries offer timely and provocative perspectives on COVID-19 that are an embodiment of the breadth and depth of health communication scholarship. They also attest to the practical relevance of the field of health communication at a time of public health emergency.

One of the main goals of public health communication is to promote risk-reduction behavior through health messaging that shapes public risk perceptions and attitudes. Although decades of research provide strong theoretical foundation and evidentiary basis for potentially effective communication interventions, our conventional wisdom must be carefully calibrated when applied to the COVID-19 pandemic, a novel infectious disease ravaging in a world of rapid social and political transformation. Understanding the unique characteristics of COVID-19 and its social and political environment is the first step toward developing effective health messages.

This special forum opens with Southwell et al.’s commentary (p. 1707) on mental models of infectious diseases. Although scientists are only beginning to understand SAR-CoV2, Southwell and colleagues argue that the general public may hold preconceptions about the virus shaped by their previous engagement with other infectious diseases such as the Zika virus. Before developing COVID-19 messages, the authors recommend scanning media coverage of past infectious diseases and conducting formative research to uncover prevalent COVID-19 mental models. In other words, the novel nature of SAR-CoV2 paradoxically makes it important to assess old ideas and biases.

The emergence of the novel coronavirus coincides with a rapid transformation of the social and political environment. First, Manganello et al. (p. 1711) observed that with the increasing dominance of social media the traditional public service announcements (PSAs) are being replaced by user-generated health content – a tweet by a celebrity encouraging people to wear masks or a Facebook video that goes viral – which has the potential of reaching and influencing thousands or even millions of people. Manganello et al. explored how user-generated health content can be creatively leveraged as a public communication tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the increasing popularity of social media, unfortunately, also ushered in an age of health misinformation. Several commentaries addressed how misinformation is compromising COVID-19 communication efforts and what can be done about it (Chou & Budenz, p. 1718; Harrington, p. 1715; Noar & Austin, p. 1735 ; Viswanath et al., p. 1743). Finally, political polarization has become a defining characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a poignant commentary, Harrington (p. 1715) reflects on how conservative political ideology leads to closed-mindedness and susceptibility to misinformation and conspiracy theories. To move the needle with a politically motivated audience, Harrington recommends, among other solutions, using messages that appeal to authority and conservative moral values.

Other important health message design issues are examined in commentaries that focus on the use of emotional appeals (Chou & Budenz, p. 1718), the utility of visuals and graphics (King & Lazard, p. 1723), how to effectively communicate uncertainties (Paek & Hove, p. 1729), and the formation of social norms during the COVID-19 pandemic (Rimal & Storey, p. 1732). Noar and Austin identified key communication challenges that had emerged during the pandemic and offered tentative solutions based on best practices of health and crisis communication.

The pain and suffering caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately inflicted under-served populations, in the U.S. and worldwide. Hull and Stevens(p. 1740) reflect upon the chilling racial disparities in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. They boldly question the utility of interventions that solely focus on individual behavior change and instead advocate for a broadened approach that directly confronts systemic barriers. Viswanath et al (p. 1743). interrogate inequities across groups in heath knowledge, information access, processing, and utilization, all of which could perpetuate disparities in COVID-19 outcomes.

Scholars of health communication are committed to translating research into practice. Rains et al (p. 1747) . developed a surveillance and communication system leveraging SMS on mobile phones along with a web interface to conduct weekly surveys of Arizona residents and deliver supportive COVID-19 messaging. In their commentary, Rains et al. highlighted crucial characteristics that would enable the success of community-based health promotion efforts such as their surveillance and messaging system. Partnering with their university, Mackert et al (p. 1750). are leading efforts to improve COVID-19 messaging for students and faculty on campus; their commentary shared valuable lessons learned and best practices of health communication for college campuses struggling to battle the pandemic.

Shaping public responses to a health crisis as complex as the COVID-19 pandemic must be tackled at multiple levels (e.g., individual, community, societal/policy) with an understanding of not only the process of individual decision making but also the environmental facilitators or constraints of individual actions. Although public health communication is only part of the overall solution to changing the behaviors of millions of individuals in order to curb the spread of SAR-CoV2, it is an indispensable part that will determine the success or failure of our pandemic response. This special forum on “Public Health Communication in an Age of COVID-19” underscores the importance and promise of harnessing the tools of public health communication in our fight against one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.