Communication about COVID-19 from Canadian provincial chief medical officers of health: a qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, Canada's provincial chief medical officers of health (CMOHs) have provided regular updates on the pandemic response. We sought to examine whether their messaging varied over time and whether it varied across jurisdictions. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study of news releases from Canadian provincial government websites during the initial phases of the COVID-19 outbreak between Jan. 21 and Mar. 31, 2020. We performed content analysis using a predefined data extraction framework to derive themes. RESULTS: We identified 290 news releases. Four broad thematic categories emerged: describing the government's preparedness and capacity building, issuing recommendations and mandates, expressing reassurance and encouraging the public, and promoting public responsibility. Most of the news releases were prescriptive, conveying recommendations and mandates to slow transmission. Cross-jurisdictional variations in messaging reflected local realities, such as evidence of community transmission. Messaging also reflected changing information about the pandemic over time, shifting from a tone of reassurance early on, to a sudden emphasis on social distancing measures, to a concern with public responsibility to slow transmission. INTERPRETATION: Messaging across jurisdictions was generally consistent, and variations in the tone and timing of CMOH messaging aligned with different and changing realities across contexts. These findings indicate that when evaluating CMOHs' statements, it is critical to consider the context of the information they possess, the epidemiologic circumstances in their jurisdiction and the way the province has structured the CMOH role.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".