[Integrating Public Health Expertise in Research: a Series of Workshops about Vector-Borne and Other Zoonotic Diseases]. / ÖGD-Expertise in die Forschung bringen: eine Workshop-Reihe zu vektorübertragenen und weiteren zoonotischen Erkrankungen.

Research groups must understand the needs and requirements of the public health service to be able to develop tools and strategies for supporting it in risk assessment and risk communication. The zoonotic research consortia RoBoPub, Q-GAPS, TBENAGER and ZooBoCo used the format of workshops to include the expertise of the public health service system in their work. We present the results of three workshops that were held with representatives of the German public health service as part of the annual congress of the Federal Association of Physicians of German Public Health Departments in 2018, 2019 and 2022. Each workshop, held in a world-café format, lasted 90 minutes and had its own thematic focus. In the first workshop, information on the goals, problems, solutions and expectations of the public health service from the research consortia concerning exposure to rodent-borne infections during their occupational and leisure-time activities as well as the use of risk maps was collected. In the second and third workshops, participants developed risk communication strategies based on scenarios of outbreaks and identifications of new risk areas. Each workshop had more than 20 participants, of which at least half worked for local public health authorities. Foremost, participants expected practical, target group-specific material for risk communication from the research groups. According to the experience of most participants, direct contact with the affected groups was essential for risk communication. To raise awareness of the situation and establish contact with the relevant target groups, social media can complement traditional media, especially for hard-to-reach groups. However, their use should be considered and planned carefully. The workshop format was appropriate for integrating the public health expertise in the research activities. The expectations of the public health service on material for risk communication could be translated into a guideline, a risk management plan and pathogen descriptions by the research groups. When integrating the expertise of the public health authorities in their work, research groups should consider how to reach a suitable panel of representatives and how to keep the workload for those at an acceptably low level.

[Sentiments in the COVID-19 crisis communication of German authorities and independent experts on Twitter : A sentiment analysis for the first year of the pandemic]. / Emotionalität in der COVID-19-Krisenkommunikation von Behörden und unabhängigen Expert*innen auf Twitter : Eine Sentiment-Analyse für das erste Pandemiejahr.

BACKGROUND: At the beginning of the COVID­19 pandemic in Germany, there was great uncertainty among the population and among those responsible for crisis communication. A substantial part of the communication from experts and the responsible authorities took place on social media, especially on Twitter. The positive, negative, and neutral sentiments (emotions) conveyed there during crisis communication have not yet been comparatively studied for Germany. STUDY AIM: Sentiments in Twitter messages from various (health) authorities and independent experts on COVID­19 will be evaluated for the first pandemic year (1 January 2020 to 15 January 2021) to provide a knowledge base for improving future crisis communication. MATERIAL AND METHODS: From n = 39 Twitter actors (21 authorities and 18 experts), n = 8251 tweets were included in the analysis. The sentiment analysis was done using the so-called lexicon approach, a method within the social media analytics framework to detect sentiments. Descriptive statistics were calculated to determine, among other things, the average polarity of sentiments and the frequencies of positive and negative words in the three phases of the pandemic. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The development of emotionality in COVID­19 tweets and the number of new infections in Germany run roughly parallel. The analysis shows that the polarity of sentiments is negative on average for both groups of actors. Experts tweet significantly more negatively about COVID­19 than authorities during the study period. Authorities communicate close to the neutrality line in the second phase, that is, neither distinctly positive nor negative.

The Spread of COVID-19 Crisis Communication by German Public Authorities and Experts on Twitter: Quantitative Content Analysis.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic led to the necessity of immediate crisis communication by public health authorities. In Germany, as in many other countries, people choose social media, including Twitter, to obtain real-time information and understanding of the pandemic and its consequences. Next to authorities, experts such as virologists and science communicators were very prominent at the beginning of German Twitter COVID-19 crisis communication. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to detect similarities and differences between public authorities and individual experts in COVID-19 crisis communication on Twitter during the first year of the pandemic. METHODS: Descriptive analysis and quantitative content analysis were carried out on 8251 original tweets posted from January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2021. COVID-19-related tweets of 21 authorities and 18 experts were categorized into structural, content, and style components. Negative binomial regressions were performed to evaluate tweet spread measured by the retweet and like counts of COVID-19-related tweets. RESULTS: Descriptive statistics revealed that authorities and experts increasingly tweeted about COVID-19 over the period under study. Two experts and one authority were responsible for 70.26% (544,418/774,865) of all retweets, thus representing COVID-19 influencers. Altogether, COVID-19 tweets by experts reached a 7-fold higher rate of retweeting (t8,249=26.94, P<.001) and 13.9 times the like rate (t8,249=31.27, P<.001) compared with those of authorities. Tweets by authorities were much more designed than those by experts, with more structural and content components; for example, 91.99% (4997/5432) of tweets by authorities used hashtags in contrast to only 19.01% (536/2819) of experts' COVID-19 tweets. Multivariate analysis revealed that such structural elements reduce the spread of the tweets, and the incidence rate of retweets for authorities' tweets using hashtags was approximately 0.64 that of tweets without hashtags (Z=-6.92, P<.001). For experts, the effect of hashtags on retweets was insignificant (Z=1.56, P=.12). CONCLUSIONS: Twitter data are a powerful information source and suitable for crisis communication in Germany. COVID-19 tweet activity mirrors the development of COVID-19 cases in Germany. Twitter users retweet and like communications regarding COVID-19 by experts more than those delivered by authorities. Tweets have higher coverage for both authorities and experts when they are plain and for authorities when they directly address people. For authorities, it appears that it was difficult to win recognition during COVID-19. For all stakeholders studied, the association between number of followers and number of retweets was highly significantly positive (authorities Z=28.74, P<.001; experts Z=25.99, P<.001). Updated standards might be required for successful crisis communication by authorities.